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By Jesi Buell.
Lance Olsen, Always Crashing in the Same Car (Fiction Collective 2, 2023)
All art is unstable…
There is no authoritative voice,
there are only multiple readings.
They say “don’t meet your heroes” but I’ve found reading biographies of them to be much more upsetting. I don’t understand most hero worship but the closest I’ve come is with two men: Kurt Vonnegut and David Bowie. When I read Charles J. Shield’s biography of Vonnegut, it broke my heart to see my hero and his less desirable characteristics. So I had high expectations and even higher apprehensions reading Lance Olsen’s latest, which the publisher FC2 describes as “a prismatic exploration of David Bowie through multiple voices and perspectives.”
The novel is a hybrid scrapbook of Bowie memorabilia compiled by an academic writing on his sabbatical. This “love song” to Bowie is part biography, part criticism, part exploration of ageing and somehow, at the same time, the idea of “unfinalizability”. The narrator is a bit snobby, the kind of guy who uses words like “paratactical” and asserts that fans know Bowie least of all. He’s someone who lets you know that you’ve been interpreting “China Girl” wrong all these years. A bit of a Comic Book Guy, if you will. He exists tangentially in this text, like everyone else, only in their relation to Bowie. His role is interesting as the curator of Bowie facts but also in the way that he is a prototypical fan who Olsen transforms into a multidimensional man, mirroring how Bowie goes from a picture in a magazine, a myth, into a much more complex character. This book treats a life like a text that is being written as we read it and, in many ways, everyone outside of Bowie exists to illustrate another facet of the man. Both Bowie and the narrator are interested in “how others write him into themselves.” He becomes an amalgam of an expansive audience’s opinions and experiences. In fact, Bowie only remembers parts of himself once he’s “read about himself reading it in a biography about him.”
One of Bowie’s superpowers was his ability to “proclaim identities” and to express himself across all types of sensory mediums. Always Crashing in the Same Car opens with his cancer writing itself across his insides. The cancer’s story enforces the idea of the physical as textual (i.e. something we read), but Olsen shows us how Bowie’s art wasn’t music. It was also his clothes, make-up, videos and films; books he read, paintings he made and art he collected, who he fucked — his art was bodily. It was performance and therefore transitory, incapable of finality. Of course it was experienced differently by different people but it was also experienced differently by the same person, as that person changed (as Bowie changed).
Books provide us with the pretence of making sense of things (every form suggests a philosophy), but the things they make sense of are constructions inhabited by fictions with crafted intentions, all loose ends interlaced and cinched. Each time we return to a text, regardless of our best efforts, the years will have regenerated it — we will have been translated into another foreign tongue of ourselves.
I love chapters like “Diamond Dogs”, which is basically a cast list of people in and around Bowie’s life who puzzle together to form a specific time. In those moments, there is a flash of an understanding of a certain Bowie. It is a special alchemy of happenstance and error and clarity, which Olsen captures beautifully in spare but deftly-rendered vignettes. These chapters make Bowie a collage himself. My absolute favorite part occurs later as a faux interview with Angie Bowie, David’s first wife. In the chapter, she is answering questions that no one is asking her (the space where the questions should be are ellipses, full with silence and prolepsis). Though she is introduced in the “Diamond Dogs” chapter as “[m]anipulative, scheming, volatile, promiscuous, bitter, emotional,” she is also the first person to be introduced, suggesting her importance in Bowie’s life, as if Bowie didn’t really start being Bowie until he met Angie. But every horrible stereotype thrown at women is given to Angie: she is a succubus, a selfish, money-crazed woman, and, worse indictment of all, an emotionally unavailable mother. “Everyone Says Hi” allows her space for her interpretation of Bowie, but also by giving space to show Bowie as fallible and temperamental — the hero, the artist, and still a real man. It is another, less seen angle from which to understand him.
As the novel continues, Olsen doesn’t shy away from the things that make Bowie complicated. He explores the Nazism and his sex with underage girls (“as young as thirteen”). It would be easy to dismiss this as an attempt to stir up controversy or for glam rock excess. While Olsen doesn’t give us answers, he asks questions that I’ve been thinking about since. How do fans weigh these horrible elements against what he did for people — his charity, his art, and how he lived his life as a symbol for misfits and social outliers?
The ellipses and the asterisks, the symbols that stand for absence, hold so much meaning in this work. They remind us of the parts in-between that we never see. Towards the end there are two similar chapters written from Iman’s point of view as she talks to a dying Bowie. They are two imaginings of the same moment that unfold very differently. These conversations are themselves ellipses, a blank page that we fill in with our own stories we pose as Bowie’s. No one saw those moments besides the two people inside them, and even they only saw one side. In Always Crashing in the Same Car, Olsen has created a poignant, stimulating meditation on definition by exploring the life of a man whose appeal is found in his ability to refuse conclusion.
The recognition and celebration that everything,
positively everything,
lives between quotation marks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesi Buell is an artist from Upstate New York. Her reviews can be seen in The Rumpus, Chicago Review of Books, Heavy Feather Review, and others. She also helms KERNPUNKT Press, a home for experimental writing.
By Seph Murtagh.
It’s Christmas Day and they are gathered in the living room when Brother #3 asks what is that plant, the plant on the table, the plant with the brown leaves; and Tired Father says those leaves aren’t brown, they’re red, that’s a poinsettia, can you see the red asks Tired Father, turning to Brother #1; and Brother #1 says he can see that one part of the poinsettia is darker than the other, but looking at the leaves he can’t tell which part of the poinsettia is red, maybe it’s just a trick of the light; and Brother #2 says he thinks the darker leaves near the top of the poinsettia might be red even though honestly they look kind of brown to him; and Brother #3 says it’s easier to identify colors when he’s looking at things he already knows, like the stocking by the fireplace, he knows that’s red, or the blanket on the lap of the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer, which has a red-and-black checkered pattern that is familiar to him even though he doesn’t know what to call it, it’s a kind of fall pattern, at any rate he knows that’s red, whereas with poinsettias, he’s really not familiar with them and he doesn’t know what color they’re supposed to be; which raises an interesting point says Brother #1, it’s not like he goes through life constantly asking himself is this green, is this red, is this orange, but then he’ll be in a situation where he’ll get a color wrong and people will learn he’s colorblind and they’ll start doing the thing where they point to random objects and ask what color is this, what color is this, and then all of a sudden he feels this terrible insecurity about colors, it’s not the colors themselves he hates, it’s the social pressure to classify them; although how often is it really a problem asks Brother #3, he wouldn’t go so far as to call it a disability, more like an occasional inconvenience; he’s not sure says Brother #2, it’s kind of a pain for him at work, the landscapers he sells to are finicky about their designs and he can’t tell the difference between purple and blue flowers; for hunting too it’s a problem says Brother #1, he can’t follow a blood trail to save his life; better make sure you have a good shot then says Brother #2; his problem is pink and gray says Brother #3; that’s a weird one says Brother #2; yes says the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer, the first sign of a problem was when Brother #3 colored the walls of a castle in his coloring book pink, there was also the time Brother #1 claimed his teacher at school had green hair, do you remember that she says to Tired Father; but Tired Father has fallen asleep on the couch; someone nudge him please she says; deuteranopia that’s what it’s called says Brother #3; is what what’s called asks Brother #2; is what pink-grey colorblindness is called says Brother #3, he just googled it; whereupon Brother #2 asks is that different from the red-green kind because for him the grass is orange especially after it’s raining and the sunlight is shining on it; for him, too, the grass is orange says Brother #1, kind of rough playing soccer as a kid and he couldn’t see the orange sidelines and the whole team would be shouting at him while he tried to do a throw-in; what are the odds of all three of you says Tired Father (having been nudged awake now by Brother #2) they’ve got to be one in a million, maybe one in a billion; they say it’s a sign of intelligence says the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer; maybe there is an evolutionary advantage to it says Brother #3, like isn’t that how evolution works, a mutation that turns into an advantage; hard to see what the advantage of colorblindness would be says Brother #2; best of all as a kid were the tests where he could see things the other kids couldn’t see says Brother #1, like a little figure eight would show up in the circle of dots and only he could see it; although those tests were the first time he knew something was wrong with him says Brother #2, before then he just saw colors and nobody asked for their names and the world was fine; and hearing this, Brother #1 looks at the Mother Who is Dying of Liver Cancer with her hair in the braids that the hospital has done up, and she’s holding a little plastic sippy cup that she’s drinking out of with a yellow straw, and in the low flickering light of the living room it gives her a childish appearance, and instantly his mind is rocketed back to his first memory of her, he was two, feeding the squirrels through the kitchen window of a rented bungalow in Vermont, and his mother’s hands were pressed against his shoulders to keep him from toppling backwards into the sink, and there were no names for things, no words even, just movements and sounds and flashes of light and bright colors, the small furry creatures poking their snouts through the window and sniffing at the breadcrumbs in his hands, and his mother pressing him forward, gently; this is the morning he remembers, suddenly, right then, looking at her, and even though all present circumstances would seem to deny it; even though the cancer has rampaged so thoroughly through her body that her time on earth is reckoned in weeks; even though his mind is stunned by the chilling presentiment that someday it will happen to him too, this decrepitude, this slide into darkness; even despite the ammonia in her liver and the failed chemotherapy treatments and the paralyzed limb that has immobilized her in a wheelchair; even despite the Sara Stedy sit-to-stand lift that took him and his father four hours to assemble, his father barking instructions at him the entire time, the Sara Stedy half-assembled on the floor beneath them and the sight of his father yelling and waving the instruction booklet in the air reminding him of how it was when he was a kid and he would help his father install drywall or rake leaves or stack firewood, and suddenly he has a premonition of how it will be when his mother is gone, the irony of striving his entire life to escape this figure who is standing beside him shouting that’s the wrong-sized screw, but it won’t matter, as soon as his mother is dead he will come crashing back into his father’s orbit, so that when he finally does locate the correct screw and tighten it into the Sara Stedy what he feels is not pleasure at completing the task but a sense that the screw is a metaphor for a metaphysical tightening that is binding him to his father forever; even despite the word commode his father keeps saying, as in, his mother needs her commode, it’s time for her to use her commode, so that finally, thinking his father is squeamish and using an archaic word as a euphemism, he bursts out laughing and asks him why he keeps saying that, and his father replies because that’s what it’s fucking called, and he googles it only to discover that, yes, that’s what it’s called; even though he knows it’s coming any day now, the moment when his phone will ring and he will answer and his father will break the news in a voice grown thin and tinny and high like he has sucked the helium out of a balloon, and not knowing what to say to his father, he’ll mutter sorry into the phone, stupidly, as if it’s a distant relative who has just died and not his own mother; even now at this late hour it does not seem impossible to him that he’ll be with her there again, in that morning of bright colors that have no names.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Seph Murtagh is a writer living in Ithaca, New York. His essays have appeared in Socrates on the Beach, the Missouri Review, and the Mid-American Review. You can find him on Twitter @sephmurtagh.
By Terri Mullholland.
Emma Bolland, Instructions from Light (Joan, 2023)
I have started to write about Emma Bolland’s book Instructions from Light several times, most of it has been in my head as I procrastinate putting the words onto the page: ‘Cut to hands, paused above a keyboard, as if about to type, frozen’. Because how can I do justice to this text?
I had a dream while writing/not writing this review that I interviewed Emma. We sat facing each other in blue velvet armchairs on an empty stage. Emma was lit by a spotlight above and I was in darkness. The conversation was about reading and writing and translation. On waking, I tried to transcribe as much of what Emma had said as possible — but I’d forgotten it all. All Emma’s words had gone and I’d just written a bad translation of badly remembered lines: ‘where is the line between dreaming and remembering? he she, they remember(s) (which one am I?)’
The experience of reading Instructions from Light is like waking up from a dream. You’re left with the images of multiple scenes — a cinematic montage that has been cut up, spliced together, and diced apart — flickering in your mind’s eye like an old film. Bolland’s text is framed by a translation of the screenplay of Le Silence by Louis Delluc. The original film is presumed lost, so everything — the staging, the lighting, and the costumes — must be reimagined. Different fonts indicate the multiple voices/characters/texts: the original manuscript, the translation, and the commentary on the translation. Thoughts vacillate between translating the text (and the difficulty and the impossibility of translating) and how to stage the work, how to translate it visually: ‘I think about my eye behind the camera’.
Then there are other voices/characters/texts woven through, the notes left in notebooks, fragments from corrupted voice files, a personal ‘I/Eye’ account that splinters the self: ‘I gather my selves around a table — I wonder where I am I wonder how it is I got here’. The reader is both disorientated and captivated as characters slip between the named protagonists of the screenplay, between I/Eye, between she/they. Within the screenplay there are also sequences of letters lying on tables, being written, opened, and read. Translating Le Silence raises difficulties in establishing who is speaking, a confusion of pronouns that is reflected throughout the book: ‘I can’t seem to settle on a frequency, hovering in a space between she and they and unable to claim either as my own’.
We have establishing shots to the text as a whole, ‘this is a book about a sanity in flux’, that continue throughout, repeated, revised, so that nothing is ever established, everything is flux. The rug is pulled, and continues to be pulled, out from under our feet if we try to get too comfy: ‘This is a story — a story plural — about remembering. A story about memory-image, and a story about memory-image questioned’.
This is a work that refuses categorisation: ‘They have learned their lesson, which is that categorisation can be used against them’. Bolland uses the language of categorisation, of the medical establishment, of mental illness, of found texts from patient instruction and medication warning leaflets, to write new texts within texts. So the overall effect is like reading a palimpsest with all the layers visible. These multiple stories intrude, collide, and seep into each other. Reading them becomes an act of listening, of witnessing, rather than interpretation. These other voices present their own difficulties of filming: ‘what annoys me is that his text seems so filmable. But their text? The others? How do I film the things for which I cannot account?’
Being unable to film it, Bolland writes the unaccountable, and the difficulties of being unaccounted for and ‘trying to locate, to write a self that has been dislocated, a self that is fragmented’, and does so brilliantly. The fragments pieced together like kintsugi; the joins glistening with light.
This is a translation, it is also a meditation on the act of translating, of reading, of listening, of interpretation, and of not doing all these things. It is about the gaps in language, in narrative, and the silences created and imposed. It is about what happens when language and understanding break apart and you start to listen to the silences underneath.
It is poetic, it is beautiful, and it is utterly compelling.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terri Mullholland is a writer and researcher living in London. She has a PhD from the University of Oxford, where she has taught English Literature and Critical Theory. Her flash fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Litro, Mercurious, and The Liminal Review, and her pamphlet of hybrid pieces Weather / Patterns was published by intergraphia books in October 2022.
By Craig Stewart Johnson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Stewart Johnson is a visual and audio artist based in Gateshead, UK. His artwork focuses on the detail and nuance of everyday textures and places. Developing from an interest in underground music, there is an obsession with the aesthetic aspects of diy culture. Analog methods of production are an ever-present inspiration, the imperfections flowing through the work informing a search for beauty and catharsis in decay. He has exhibited at various location in the UK and further afield, as well as having multiple sound works published though record labels such as Kirigirisu Recordings, Crow Versus Crow and Modern Concern. His mostly recent publication of collage work, Dead Negatives, was published by Paper View Books, Portugal. He is currently a postgraduate researcher at Northumbria University researching self-organisation and DIY culture in underground experimental music.
Andrei Codrescu interviewed by John Wisniewski.
3:AM: When did you begin writing, Andrei?
AC: Before I started reading. I had to repeat first grade because I couldn’t read, but I wrote a lot imitating the letters in books. When the reading bud opened in my brain I read what I wrote — ethereal beautiful made all kinds of sense (to me). Schoolbooks were excruciatingly boring by comparison. There are few books I’ve read since that came close to my preliterate works. I wish I still had them but my stepfather burned them for heat in the winter of 1953 when Stalin died.
3:AM: Could you tell us about your early life?
AC: I was paralyzed by terror that my mother was an ice witch. I was shot by soldiers from a moving truck and was hit below the knee with a wooden sabot by a little girl when we moved to a new apartment. I loved my mother’s sister Anna who wore glasses, chain-smoked and read books in three languages. My cousin Y showed me hers and I showed her mine: there was no hair around either hers or mine. Her father taught me chess and let me win.
3:AM: What inspires you to write?
AC: Novelty, surprise — streets I never saw before, people on the New York subway, witty people, story tellers, great books by authors nobody has heard of, found texts of pamphlets, wind blown newspapers, lost letters, exhibitionists, masked humans, people with humdrum jobs who change into royalty at festivals, Orchard Street and brunch at Katja’s on the Lower East Side, NY; funny things my friends do, intelligent dogs and repair shops.
3:AM: What were your first published works?
AC: All my work was published in the akashik record, then in print in Steaua (The Star) and Flacara Sibiului (The Flame of Sibiu) in Transylvania, then in The World (New York) and El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City).
3:AM: Any favourite authors and poets?
AC: It’s true: authors are not poets. I don’t like authors, but I like the poets Arghezi, Bacovia, Blaga, Berrigan and Villon.
3:AM: Tell us about writing the film Road Scholar — what was the idea for the screenplay?
AC: There was no screenplay, there was only a cherry red convertible Cadillac and America.
3:AM: What was your idea for convening Exquisite Corpse?
AC: I published Exquisite Corpse, I didn’t “convene” it: I would have to be God to convene a corpse, whether dead or alive! Exquisite Corpse was a flat, long newspaper aka The Pravda of the Avantgarde. The idea of the Corpse was to kill all dead establishment poets and expose live ones to the blitzkrieg of small press fame.
3:AM: Why did you decide to speak on National Public Radio?
AC: It was amusing!
3:AM: Any thoughts or controversial remarks?
AC: Yes. I didn’t make enough. Hopefully next time you look me up, Google will be a thing of the past like Xerox
3:AM: hat are you working on now, Andrei?
AC: A secret project with arctic AIs.
Check out our previous interviews with Andrei Codrescu from 2003 and 2009.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
John Wisniewski has written for amfm Magazine, Perfect Sound Forever magazine, the LARB and Chiron Review.
By George Berger.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
And so we depart Beckenham Junction, but not Beckenham itself. Because Kent House is still part of Beckenham really.
The station – just seven miles from London Victoria, was named after Kent House Farm. Yes, there was a time when you could travel seven miles from the centre of London and come across farmland. One day they’ll say that about Sevenoaks. Maybe one day they’ll say that about Maidstone – the Japanese know how it works.
In the Petts Wood article, I mused on how my parents moved down from Merseyside for a better life. That was where we lived, but Kent House was where my dad worked for the main part, at Ravensbourne Registration Services. From the late 60s until a couple of strokes forced his retirement in the late 80s, whereupon he hi-tailed it back to the Wirral, got happier and never looked back.
RRS was something to do with shares, I never really understood what. It was also, as far as I could see, something to do with wearing suits, lots to do with feeling pressure and nothing to do with happiness.
Kent House, then, is immortally tied to the world of work in my eyes. To the concept of work, the protestant work ethic, the numerous morality tales and guilt trips laid on me as I tried to find my own way through early life from the ages of 5-25.
Of course, all this was seen through the prism of my dad’s experience only. Perhaps the other employees were happy as Larry. That’s how life works though, isn’t it? You only see what you want to see, and in a decidedly pre-internet world, that view could be quite narrow, almost the wrong end of a telescope.
From when you’re born up to roughly when you start school, your brain operates in theta state, forever downloading information without question, wherever it comes from. This becomes your subconscious programming – all downloaded without a virus checker – and it’s a bastard to shift if you want to change it later.
I mention this because, as in the Beckenham Junction piece, I was busy downloading pop-hippie song lyrics off the radio. Songs that suggested a better world but also often hinted that avoiding a lifetime of work was a great path to ‘feeling groovy’.
“Slow down, you move too fast…”
My dad left Merseyside before us, staying in a B&B for over 6 months while he earned enough for us to move down. Thus, the first thing Kent House did was steal my dad. He’d work 12 hour days, 7 till seven, in an attempt to improve his lot in life. OK, our lot in life. He was permanently stressed out.
This was held up before me as some kind of noble way of being. Train to Kent House every morning, home again in the evening, too tired to do anything except drain a bottle in a fumbling search for equilibrium.
Of course, a part of growing up is watching your parents morph from the omnipotent infallible beings you thought they were, into normal people doing their best to muddle through. You experience a similar loss of magic to that moment you realise Father Christmas doesn’t actually exist. My dad did his best, it took me a long time to realise that he had his own set of influences, experiences and circumstances to deal with. That he could feel doubt and pain and fear and all those things that never plague comic book superheroes.
“And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die”
– Teach Your Children, Crosby Stills Nash & Young
I sought my dad’s love and approval at every turn but our relationship was massively strained by my being a punk rocker and deciding not to get a job. The conflict of values would take decades to get over or more accurately just fade into the past. I was taught to seek his approval, but that approval was only ever measured in exam results, in conformity and in supposed ‘good’ behaviour. As puberty hit, I started failing these tests more and more.
At the time, I just thought he was being completely unreasonable, that he wouldn’t listen. That he put his values before any love for me. Nowadays, as I approach the 25th anniversary of his passing, I can see that I somehow tapped into his deepest fears and exposed them like bare nerve-endings. Like that moment when the dentist gets a filling wrong. That’s how I made him feel. Which isn’t a great realisation.
Whether he should have felt like that is almost beside the point. We were two strong characters and there could be no meeting point at the time. And Kent House was the HQ of these values, the temple where he devoutly practiced his beliefs five or six days a week, in exchange for the money to survive and feed his family. An impartial observer might almost start hating capitalism for the soul-crushing cruelty of all this.
And then, finally, I have a vision that changes everything. A vision of my father as a frightened little boy, one who had a far tougher upbringing than I did, for all my whinging. A scared little boy who doesn’t understand his harsh surroundings. A tear running down his five year old cheek. A barefoot boy who left school at 14 to get a job and look after his disabled mum, his father having passed away due to an accident on the docks. A boy forced to be a man way before his time.
But also a boy who could never know what he didn’t know, what he’d never been shown. Who became a man who did his ultimate best with the paltry toolkit he’d been provided with. Who did his best for me, and got little to no understanding in return at the time, or since. Until this vision. This vision that points out you can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t give what you haven’t got. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
And the forgiveness pours out of me like healing light. And I relax – for the first time since I was born – about all this.
He was a victim in Kent House, but not of Kent House, as such. So the forgiveness spreads like heightened awareness, like some kind of benign goo from a kid’s cartoon. I would’ve got away with a cartoon vision of all this too, if it wasn’t for the pesky kids of awareness pulling my mask off.
It took me six months to write those last few paragraphs. You could say it took me 40 years to think them.
A bit of light relief, you say? Well, one of his workmates was a relative of Siouxsie Sioux. Tom Page, I think my mum said he was called.
My parents told me another workmate would have a bottle of Guinness with his breakfast. In my everlasting naivety, I just thought this was gorgeously eccentric, rather than any kind of tip of the iceberg stuff. An impartial observer… etc.
As a young child, I remember proudly telling someone my dad was “fourth in charge of a skyscraper”. Cringeworthy stuff, for sure. Perhaps 7 stories high, his office was a skyscraper to me. I think I just made up the ‘fourth in charge’ bit. I desperately wanted him to be important. These were the values I was growing up in the presence of; in acute, deliberate hostility to the relative benevolence of Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & Papas.
And then I heard Patti Smith singing ‘Free Money’:
“Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad
I take that money, buy you things you never had.”
And everything changed, again. She’d already bought my heart with ‘Birdland’. Another guy in my class went further with it, all the way to prison for armed robbery. Almost an antique crime now of course. He became good pals with my mum later, before tragically succumbing to cancer.
I watched from the sidelines, but I always knew which side I was on. Not my dad’s, sadly. Not Patti Smith’s either, ultimately. Nice words Patti, but none that you ever lived. You just painted them on sounds (and I thank you dearly for that, but…) then you walked away, backstage – to your tour manager and your backstage rider and your paycheck. I don’t begrudge you that, but it wasn’t much use to me.
Or my dad. Especially my dad.
Only Arista was pretty. And so it goes. But where it’s going, everyone knows – let’s not kid ourselves.
Fast forward to 1993 and the IRA put a bomb on a train which exploded at Kent House. By this point, my dad was back on Merseyside and I was in Brighton so I have no memory of this at all. Due warnings had been given and there were no injuries. I do wonder why they chose Kent House – or maybe they didn’t? Maybe it was just where the train happened to be when it was evacuated. Either way, it’s one of the more notable things to have happened on this trainline.
So, yeah, Kent House. My dad the unconsciously willing victim, like Woodward in Wickerman style. Led by the limits of his perception into a world populated by others with (I’ve always thought) a knowingly different reality going on. And here I am, the result of it all, writing about Kent House from some far off viewpoint.
You see, a short while later, I heard the Clash advising me to Stay Free. And, for all their faults, something in their song – maybe the south London setting – rang more true than Patti (and it hurts to say that TBH). So I thought fuck it and I decided to stay free.
Which I did – all the way to Sydenham Hill.
But first…
Barely any distance at all up the line is Penge East, which is more of the same. There really isn’t enough distance for anything to have happened since the last station.
Only something has happened – as you pull into the platform, everything suddenly feels more urban.
Because somehow Penge East in the 80s is an island of a more cosmopolitan society, unlike the stations before it and unlike the next couple of stations after it. It’s like a peninsula – or a needle – jutting into the side of the surrounding areas and gives off an accordingly different vibe.
In the six months it’s taken to write this piece, I’ve been reading Tracey Thorn’s book, Another Planet. Purportedly a book about the suburbs, I read glowing reviews about it and figured it would be a nice companion to this train journey. Only it’s actually about a place outside London completely – beyond even the M25, and she seems to look back on it all with more affection than I do. So it’s weird and makes me ask questions about myself – am I still fired by anger as I write this? I’d very much like to think not, but Tracey’s writing makes me think of comfort blankets, even when she’s being critical.
Far closer to my feeling is the recently departed lyrical genius Mark Astronaut, venting – indeed spitting – his disdain out: “I might crack up soon, but they won’t bury me in the suburbs”. Mark was from Welwyn Garden City, north of London and not far from where Tracey grew up. It gives me a pathetic kind of pleasure to think that my suburbs are more urban than theirs.
At least the train is heading in the right direction. We’ve crossed an invisible line and we’re now in the territory where people can catch buses into the West End as well as trains. Indeed, they seem to have more options in every direction. Proper destinations on the front.
In some respects, Penge East in the 80s was like Green Park tube in London, which should really be renamed ‘change at Green Park’, because that’s what you always do there.
‘Change at Penge East’ would be to a bus for me, but not into the centre: first to Crystal Palace football ground when Liverpool would visit, back in the 70s and 80s when we used to win everything and every game was a survival test outside the ground.
Then in the other direction, some years later to Forest Hill where Bill, the Flowers in the Dustbin drummer, lived for a wild while. Every time I see Forest Hill mentioned anywhere, it seems to be the venue for wild happenings – from legendary swinging sixties parties to the punk/reggae 70s at Don Lett’s house.
Then, later still, back to Crystal Palace to see the Sex Pistols play what I gather (hope) was one of their most disappointing gigs. Change at Penge East, the place that never changes.
Have you ever missed a station because your mind was elsewhere? I’m afraid I’m about to do that.
There’s a big hill just beyond this station. A hill that at some point had to be tunneled through to get the train line towards London, Rather like most of the train lines in Switzerland I guess. But the sound in my head is not the sound of music; not at all. It’s a darker sound altogether.
Every time I’m on this train, as it pulls out of Penge East, it enters the tunnel and, a slave to cliché, I involuntarily enter my own darkness.
Because the next station is Sydenham Hill. A place where… where words start to fail me through the sheer terror of remembering… not that I could ever forget… not that I would ever forget…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
By Emma Jones.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed by Céline Sciamma, 2019
I wanted to use the tools of cinema so you would feel the patriarchy without actually having to embody it with an antagonist
– Céline Sciamma, 2019
Set in eighteenth-century France, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) hints at the patriarchal society that dictates the conditions of the women who inhabit the film. It is the reason why the painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), submits work for exhibition under her father’s name. It is the reason, too, why she has been called to a small island off the coast of Brittany. The Countess (Valeria Golino) has commissioned her to paint a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), due by arrangement to be married to a Milanese aristocrat. Mentioned but not seen is Héloïse’s sister who, rather than succumb to marriage, chose instead to jump off the rocky cliffs that surround the island. Héloïse is her replacement, the planned portrait her dowry.
If the patriarchy defines the rules of the society in which the narrative is set, however, then it sits on the periphery. The focus, instead, is on how desire builds and is felt, as Marianne and Héloïse become lovers. The relationships in the film that are defined by power, ownership and oppression, are the antithesis of the one formed between Marianne and Héloïse. As the latter begins to paint the former we see an affair born between equals. And, tellingly for a film that is about the relationship between artist and sitter, it is through the act of looking that this equality is engendered. Throughout, director and writer Céline Sciamma creates a visual language that is a purposeful act of transgression.
The relationship between Héloïse and Marianne, and to a different extent, between them and the young housekeeper Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), is something they create for themselves, that sits outside existing frames of reference. It’s an argument for an alternative mode of being, and it is built through a different mode of looking. That’s the process we are watching in Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a figuring out of new ways to look at one another and, by extension, at the world around us. It feels like Sciamma is trying to invent something too, a cinematic vision that breaks out of its own patriarchal confines. It is a queering of vision, and a rebellion against existing lesbian love stories in cinema that place performative eroticism over any meaningful connection.
This way of looking impacts each and every scene. Nothing in Sciamma’s film is wasted. Everything is slowed right down. With cinematographer Claire Mathon she creates a space in which intimacy can flourish. Not just between Marianne and Héloïse, but between character and audience too. In minute nine of the film, Marianne has only just arrived at the house, after travelling by boat to the island. She has not yet met Héloïse. Candlelit, she walks down the empty staircase in her stained painter’s smock, makes her way into the sparse kitchen and finds cheese and bread in the cupboards. There’s no dialogue and, like the rest of the film, there is no musical score either, only diegetic sound — sighs of wind in the corridors, the crackle of the fire in the kitchen.
There is nothing in this scene that anticipates some big reveal, but neither is it simply a bridge used to drive the narrative forward. Indeed, Sciamma’s practice as a screenwriter begins with two lists: a ‘desired’ list and a ‘needed’ list. Over time, after the desired elements have been mapped onto the needed scenes, she says ‘you can end up in a position where you have two scenes you want, without the bridge you need’. That’s how this scene feels. It sits outside of any conflict and yet still tells a story. It is a minute in time held up to the light for purposeful consideration. There is no need to wait for something to happen. It is already here, and it is quietly revelatory.
The story up until minute nine of the film focuses on the painter. It is a group of young women we see at the very start of the film, making their marks on paper. Marianne guides them. ‘First, my contours. The outline,’ she tells her class, ‘Not too fast. Take time to look at me’. It’s the first words we hear (or read, if, like me, you are watching the subtitles in English over the original French). As an audience, then, it is Marianne whom we have considered first. The artist/muse dichotomy falls apart. We watch as her students look at her, in a way that she has dictated. It is something we are reminded of as she in turn paints Héloïse, and when Héloïse reminds her that she isn’t the only one regarding, seeing, when she tells Marianne: ‘If you look at me, who do I look at?’.
Keep looking, Sciamma suggests, and we may find a gaze that is reciprocal, one that we recognise and one that we can hold, tenderly.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Jones is a freelance art and non-fiction writer who is interested in the slippery form of the essay. Emma was previously Curatorial Assistant at Tate Modern, where she specialised in photography. Curatorial credits include solo displays on Graciela Iturbide (2019), Ernest Cole (2020) and Šejla Kamerić (2022). Recent writing credits include contributions to the book publication Photography: A Feminist History (2021), the magazine L’Essenzial Studio Journal V.4 (2022) and online at Lucy Writers Platform (2023). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow
Daniel Davis Wood interviews Dominic Jaeckle.
SJ Fowler’s MUEUM, published by Tenement Press, is a novella equal parts gnomic, unsettling, and bitterly funny. Set in the apparently early days of post-apocalyptic civilisation—a civilisation that uncertainly apes a fragmented concept of what “civilisation” entails—MUEUM explores the ins and outs of a museum that acts as a repository for the ephemera of a long-lost way of life. With MUEUM currently shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, Tenement Press editor Dominic Jaeckle spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood about the origins of MUEUM and its reception.
3:AM: Look at the opening lines of MUEUM and it seems like something familiar enough, with its gestures towards a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But very quickly it turns into something less familiar, more difficult to pin down: abstract, often theoretical, an intellectual exercise, but not a cold one—an exercise in morbid self-deprecation and deadpan humour, as much as anything else. How did you encounter MUEUM as something you felt compelled to publish?
DJ: From the editorship of Hotel on through to the advent of Tenement’s activities back in 2021, I was drawn to the spike of SJ Fowler’s anarchic wit, and I’ve been fortunate enough to count on Fowler as a friend and frequent collaborator. With either the page or stage in mind, our collaborations have always leaned on conversation, and the candour of our exchanges always proved coloured by a free circulation of ideas. Be it a consideration of creativity, fresh enthusiasms, works-in-progress, or projects-in-percolation—all was ever fair game—and (in the best sense of the word) it seemed inevitable that, once the Press had found its feet, we’d begin thinking on the prospect of our working on a publication together.
The idea of publishing MUEUM emerged organically from the critical palette of such a kinship, from such a free market of mind. Fowler sent on MUEUM as a fully formed manuscript, and I was struck by the ways in which his first draft compounded an array of entrapments via his acute, curt prose. In MUEUM, we’ve the biographical; the bibliographical; the philosophical; the personal; the institutional; the intellectual; and a dedication to the psychic ironies and chemical truths that compete for attention in any circumnavigation of the notion of hourly pay. Of the value of time. All heady nodes in a constellation of concerns that butt heads over a short distance, like livestock suddenly all too aware of the farm’s fence line, in sum—and as a manuscript—MUEUM seemed to write itself down as a prism of prisons.
3:AM: So what was it about the book that hooked you and convinced you to take it on?
DJ: As a debut novella that owed to a writer of more renown as a champion of free association and spontaneity (by way of his dedication to the works of poets such as Tom Raworth and David Antin), my first reading felt akin to sitting with a bird whom seeks to speak to (and scrutinise) its own clipped wings. The manuscript felt like an experiment in articulating an idea in a continually narrowing space, and its reflexive response to the circumstances of such a claustrophobia (one part slapstick; two parts tragedy) gifted the novella a distinct magnetism. Following Steve’s first email, I read his pages in a sitting, and the book would publish a year later.
Formally, such an atmosphere is key to Tenement’s list more broadly. Tenement aims to platform works in which authors, poets and translators challenge the limited space afforded a page via a testing of the curbs of convention and, in biographical terms, MUEUM is also a fascinating rejoinder to Fowler’s own practice. Fowler has ever worked to establish his own defiantly independent context for his work (and a showcase of the works of others); his is a generous, assertively strange and ever-enthusiastic field of enquiry; but there’s always a simmering cynicism at the core of his writing.
In my first encounter with MUEUM, I was reminded of a line from his 2017 collection, The Wrestlers: ‘Diogenes the Cynic said nothing upon hearing Zeno’s arguments, but stood up and walked in order to demonstrate the falsity of Zeno’s conclusions.’ That “standing and walking” work as quite a beautiful means of thinking through the varied emphases of Fowler’s playful and prolific productivity as a poet is true, to my mind. However, MUEUM represented a study of the ways in which certain things inhibit our gait, our capacity for independent thought, our ability to freewheel through the corridors and wings of such an imagined glasshouse as Fowler’s “museum.” Rather than an imago of any free agent aiming defiantly to walk on, their strident sense of self intact, MUEUM—with Buster Keaton’s acuity and a brand of Bernhardian savagery—musters a picture of the ways in which the world (or a city, and its various ecosystems) interrupts any capacity to stride on freely. It’s a banana peel of a novella, and it’s that precise quality of Steve’s writing which first drew me to the project.
3:AM: You mention the idea of MUEUM developing from your kinship with Fowler, but how did that kinship play out editorially in the development of the book? I mean, thinking on the book that was published a year after you received the first draft, did your collaborative discussions go beyond the idea to shape that draft into its final form?
DJ: The novella was near finished by the time it reached me; the fact of MUEUM very much preceded the idea of it as book, in this instance. Fowler shared the manuscript without much of any spiritual sculpture, per any sense of the writing’s more theoretical angles, nor did he elaborate at all on the political indications of its implications. We spoke a little to the bibliographic precedent to his putting pen to paper, but—in the main—such conversations centred on a reminiscence of using and abusing a university library’s facilities, and photocopying major and minor works of fiction in full (to then stroll away with the works of the Nestbeschmutzer rolled up in the back pocket like the daily news, treating a history of European literature like a cryptic crossword to be ritually abused with morning coffee).
Writing in the margins of the works of such authors as Witold Gombrowicz and Elias Canetti seems to have been key to MUEUM’s development. The Kafkaesque kicking “K” of Fowler’s work is a character called Greg—a human subjected to the demands of the museum’s stewardship—and it felt imperative that the sensation of subjection as the book would carry should never feel as though it was set in place in order to solve anything. The book is an apposite objection to the very idea of a Roman à Clef (the museum’s doors are open to the public on a daily basis; if they’re locked, they’re locked, and it’s the staff’s doing), and it felt imperative to allow for the novella’s architecture to build itself on a policy of plain speech. A dedication to the simple presentation of matter, of happening, and to sound out the burr of an all-too-human presence in the institutional sphere.
Descriptions of paintings; of trees; of hallways; signage; the colour of over-steeped tea; noises and visions… “The museum is a shop for all that,” as Fowler puts it in MUEUM, and he’d tooled and tilled the text again and again to strip the meat and muscle from sentences, levelling the language to a kind of line of sight, which’d prove handsomely to justify the book’s relationship with abstraction. Follow the metaphors to their logical conclusion, and—in end—things could simply sit there as things. This would qualify both people and artefacts as elements of the museum’s strange architecture—diminishing all symbolic hierarchies so as a fire extinguisher proves as triumphal a metonym for a history of human civilisation as a Horus statuette.
Indeed, there’s a quiet argumentative line throughout the novella per a need to disquiet a want to wash an idea in too much philosophy (knowing full well that philosophy would seep into the seams of the book irrespective of such), and our editorial collaboration necessarily proved a paean to the exercise of exorcising complexity. We’d worked to engine along on a policy of trial and error. Courting ways and means of framing, sometimes fragmenting, and then reforging the prose, Fowler worked in isolation in an enormously concentrated fashion. Letting the book percolate—rewild itself—to then boil the writing down, down, to its bare bones. This would resolve in the more skeletal prose as has landed on the page, and allowed for us to toy carefully with sentence, space, and paragraph as we’d worked our way through to print.
3:AM: I’m curious about how readers of MUEUM have responded to it, as far as you’ve been able to tell. I imagine that some readers would be familiar with SJ Fowler’s work, and others might’ve come to it via an affinity for Tenement—but Fowler is a poet, and Tenement has published poetry up to now, so how has it been received as both the author’s and the press’ first foray into prose?
DJ: Responses to the novella have been gloriously diverse. Some have pointed to its innate calamity; its relationship with catastrophe; its scrutiny of work and precarity. Others have indicated its comedy as key, or spoken to its metatextual referentiality as fundamental (the Los Angeles Review of Books argued the novella is in direct correspondence with a “minatory canon,” vis-à-vis Ballard, Céline, and others). But the lens I’ve accidentally inherited owes to a long dialogue between Fowler and Gareth Evans we’d recorded in Resonance FM’s Bermondsey studios last Spring. Evans numbers the idea (and question) of “collective purpose” as at the heart of the novella. Opining the book as a “novel-come-manifesto” that queries all aspects of the museum, he’d argued MUEUM sits ever-interrogatively as “a radical prose intervention” into the very meaning of the word “museum.” What it stands for; what it means in civilisational terms; per its labour and stewardship… Why we forge museums in the present, as things around us so rapidly decay and shape-shift (and in light of the “staggering uncertainty” of the present), seems be a keystone to the book that conversations have gravitated around.
Readers I’ve had a chance to speak to have broadly responded well to the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella, but also to its want to raise questions rather than solve any particular thesis, table any particular theory, qualify any specific political direction. In MUEUM, we’ve an automobile that refuses to elect its lane, and that not only feels fundamental to the conversations I’ve had with readers and collaborators since the book’s publication, but also appeals to the curious place of the novel as an inquisitive tool in our present moment. MUEUM frames itself as in a satirical confrontation with historic matter—with the ways in which objects forge a false narratological glue for our comprehension of the present—and quietly prefigures the form of the novel itself as though a rare, disintegrating museum. A structure capable of celebrating its own misdirection, misgivings, and creative lineage. The work’s confusion is germinal, and that’s funny, in its way—or allows comedy to stew on the hob behind the scenes, page for page—but also seems to be the beating heart of Fowler’s project, the centre of its melancholy, and the thump of that particular brand of pulmonary percussion has been brilliant to privy to.
At a late launch for the novella last Autumn, Chloe Aridjis read from her own diamond-like novel Asunder (itself an incendiary portrayal of a museum’s staff), and she’d cited Jean Clair’s Malaise dans les musées (by way of Adorno’s pun on the link between a “museum” and a “mausoleum”) so as to home in on Clair’s signalling of the museum as an indicator of our shared desire for stasis and stillness; of a natural want to hold something steadily enough for proper observation. The problem, as Aridjis quite strikingly put it, is that every surface gives way to pressure eventually, to a kind of physical or critical craquelure. MUEUM deliberately sets out to amplify the crackle of antiqued paint, and speak through the noise to our tacit acceptance of often inhuman conditions in its consideration of the composition of culture, and the kind of labour called upon to safeguard a consensus around what any history of a culture looks like. This penetrates the novella’s relationship with language, with violence, with comedy, and—ultimately—expresses itself as a kind of a carnival of boredom (and cold portrait of its effects).
That a book sits still until you break its spine seems be Fowler’s coy smile or wry joke, and seems also to have chimed with the readers with whom I’ve been lucky enough to discuss the book. As a “first foray into prose” for Tenement, such ideas proved intriguing from the starting gate.
3:AM: It’s quite striking to see your description of “the dynamic doubt that riddles this novella.” That doubt — that generative restlessness and refusal of resolution — is I think what I also responded to most strongly as a reader. How important do you think that sort of quality is to winning your enthusiasm when you’re looking at what to publish? I suppose I could almost see a commitment to a sort of creative uncertainty as an essential part of what you’re hoping to publish with Tenement, though I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Perhaps it’s easier to ask the inverse: are you likely to muster similar enthusiasm for prose that turns towards more traditional ends, with narrative setups, incidents, and resolutions?
DJ: A grounding thought for the architectonics of Tenement’s doings owes a great deal to critic Manny Farber, and his sense of a ‘termite art’ as in counterpoint to the work of the ‘white elephants’ of the twentieth century. Progenitors of humidor-like projects that showcase a ‘drive to break out of tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.’ Siding his ‘termite’ with the ‘tapeworm’— with ‘moss’ and with ‘fungus’—Farber alludes to a kind of creativity that ‘goes always forward eating its own boundaries, […] termite-like, it feels its way through the walls of particularisation’ to eat away ‘the immediate boundaries of [an] art, and [turn] these boundaries into the conditions of the next achievement.’
Resolution, as such, is not the enemy. If you write the story of a housefire, for example, that the building burns down is not a keystone to the telling, but is obviously intrinsic to the work. Likewise, Farber doesn’t flag convention nor the traditional ends-and-means of a story as any indicator that there’s an ‘elephant’ in the room (he cites John Wayne’s ‘bitter-amused’ performance in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance as emblematic of such a train of thought for its ‘intramural’ qualities). I feel Farber’s distinction and celebration of the ‘termite’ is key to literature’s part in our present moment, in attendant conversations that concern the place of the page in discussions of our political and philosophical present… “Creative uncertainty,” as you beautifully put it, is definitely a characteristic I’d always seek out as a reader, but largely as a means of ascertaining the porousness of a boundary or borderline (be it in formal, disciplinary, aesthetic terms, or otherwise). The “termite” helps frame the integrity and authenticity of an experiment, to my mind—rather than simply a want to flesh out its more chaotic characteristics—and it’s the termite’s aura we aim to better articulate via Tenement’s output.
3:AM: I mentioned above that MUEUM is the first prose title to be published by Tenement, but since then you’ve published a couple of collections of short prose and you’ve got a novella coming out later this year. What’s the appeal of the movement towards prose for you, and how do you see prose and poetry co-existing at Tenement into the future?
DJ: MUEUM may be our first prose title, strictly speaking, but Tenement endeavours to evade organising itself in terms of such formal distinctions. Enthusiasm underwrites the Press, and the aim withstands that we seek champion a kind of internationalist experiment that concentrates on the cohesiveness of a work rather than its categorisation as one thing or another. This is as true of Fowler’s work as it is of Brossa’s El saltamartí / The Tumbler (translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths), wherein we’ve a collection of miniature verse works that investigate how ‘a bird spreads its wings’ in moments of cultural unrest. Of Kyra Simone’s recent Palace of Rubble—a collation of prose vignettes spooled from a vocabulary inherited (or appropriated) from the front page of the New York Times and the daily news cycle. Of Pasolini, and his La rabbia / Anger… A collection of poems in sequence that antagonise the politics of mediated attention so as to stage an interrogation of the between-space of page and screen. Of Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger’s Agitated Air, and its tooling a chain translation of Ibn Arabi’s Tarjuman al-Ashwaq / The Interpreter of Desires so as to develop a study of the translator’s space, their labour, and elucidate the creative potential of conversation and creative exchange via concentrating on the distance a poem can travel.
Be it Jeffrey Vallance’s lifelong and Columbo-like scrutiny of spiritual esoterica—Stanley Schtinter’s anti-curatorial, lyrical antagonisms—or our forthcoming publication of the verse-prose of Reza Baraheni, the near-novelistic poetry of Dolors Miquel, or the epicism and revolutionary aspects of childhood as underpins the work of Mario Benedetti, Tenement aims investigate the margin between formal distinctions rather than think through any co-habitation of forms within a catalogue.
Our list hopes to blur categorisation, to build a conversation in series between titles, and to see what kind of arguments and ideas emerge via the act of simply putting one book beside another.
MUEUM by SJ Fowler is published by Tenement Press and is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
By SJ Fowler.
Fruitless orchard lines the graceless square barricade of the blockade. It stops the crowd amassing and overwhelming the gate. Planted from memory, from some gardeners’ notes, a recollection of blueprints, is the line of tall, absolutely un-tropical, trees. They are oddly tall, like certain people, swaying above even the spiked tip of the obstruction doors. They have foliage only upon their upper reaches, where it’s too high for men to climb. In that regard there has been fidelity to how it used to be. Outside the first Museum. Old we might say, rather than first. Who can say what Museum was first? That is for a Museum of Museums. Something likely to be on its way.
The trees slough their dander down upon the queues, and into the courtyard, onto the staff and public alike. Though they aren’t alike, in countenance or conduct. In tiny insectoid woollen stars the spores of these trees come down and cling to rough cloth. They also find their way, in miniscule shards, like hairs on a fish, onto the fingers, skin and eyes of the lucky. For many, in doing so, they cause red eye, hacking coughs and irresistible itching. The trees have been implanted in memory of the trees. Practicalities be damned. It has been mooted that were they once replaced with plastic replicas, that their rain had irritated the wrong curator. Plastic trees would still harbour the past. I can see the argument. Some say sacrilege, and controversy. But there would then be no consequence for human health. So, what would be the point? To just be observed, to be looked at? For the public to say, this is what they looked like? Rather than, this is what they are?
It occurs to me they are plastic, and there is a machine, or machines inside, which produce the fluff. The idea makes me satisfied, because what a creative thought that is. And what kind of toxicity that would produce—using that word properly. But one step at a time, we’re not at the ‘what’s worst for human health above all other factors’ stage quite yet. We’re getting there. The fact is, do we know why the original Museum would’ve have planted such painful, ugly trees?
Particulars are not the worry.
In the forecourt, before the gate, flanked by our barracks, and leading to the main entrance, clumps of inane-in-appearance bushes line the curves of gardens and circle the iced surfaces of the mostly hidden ponds. No fences surround them. We get a few pleasant splashes per day. The bushes are there to listen. See what the chatter is on the way in. I am young, but old enough to know when they were inert. The microphones are not well disguised, and that is the point. If you see them, then you are seen looking.
We go out into the courtyard for our breakfast every day, in a very strict routine. It’s every day we do that. Ideal, to eat early. We wait until the trees have ceased their shedding. There is a small guard shed to shelter, if it is brutally cold, as it often is, during a season or two. Our house, as it’s known, the barracks, is white, with two floors and a mansard roof. It is surrounded by firs and thuyas, flowerbeds and paths, which are plastic, and once dumbfounded us all, individually, like a historical vision. We were used to nothing, when each of us got our jobs here, as guards.
When we first laid eyes upon these places and plants, some thought them a mirage, those that had been on the teams. But, as I’ve always said, hallucinations tend to fade. It’s not like things are bad enough for them to be necessary. As they were when we were doing that work, cleaning things up, getting our hands grubby. Before the antagonisms this would have been nothing. But over time their permanence makes them seem more real than they are. The feeling that they are not true, that they are at odds, is afforded only to the nostalgic. Those who cling to a notion of the organic and artificial. Which seems, to me, spoiled. I suppose this is the point of plastic flowers.
We guards are sat around small circular tables, eating. Here comes a visitor host, in a green jacket. At first, they are waving to us, in the distance, so they don’t cause alarm. You never can tell. There is a friendly repartee between the guards and the hosts. Green jackets and orange jackets. There is some gentle mockery, some industrial enmity. But not a real rivalry, really. Guards are guards, mostly ex-service, with some civilians recently, as we die out, and visitor hosts are what they are without a specific and notable previous career. They are chosen because of their willingness to be pliable in the face of cataclysmic human rudeness.
This host is careful. She asks if we slept well? We are all with pink eyes from lack and the older guards murmur as they young smile. The dead of night last night crosses my mind, but no one, including me, wants to hear about my dreams. Some people don’t even have them or say they don’t remember them. The visitor host continues to chat idly, about the gateway, and the fields and the sweep of country, as she calls it, gesturing behind her, to nothing in particular. A little wind kicks up with her, she Is talking about production, how many visitors they expect today. She glosses over. In her hand is a little, hardened clump of mud. It looks like it has passed through a worm. She works it finely between her fingers, never breaking it from a bubble. I am repelled, as is intended, by her growing enthusiasm. I wonder where she found that clod? She is a program worker, an early riser, she has probably been up and about for hours already. Not ingenious enough to be a curator. In her defense, she looks as though she has recovered from a dire illness. She flaunts her jacket and swipes her thin hands around us all as she talks over the older guards. How familiar she seems, between plastic flowers, to loom above us. Her eyes peep out like lumps on a bent plate, all milky, the same soft colour as those horrid dreams we don’t have. She casts a brief glance over me, and smiles, nodding to approve of my shape. She has fake rabbit skins on her belt, hanging from ear to tail, ready to be bunched by the lengthy ears in her outstretched grip for a tour or live display. She will likely play a Neolithic hunter today, or maybe a Roman. The plastic rabbits are bound up with a red bow. Weird she looks at me so intently, I feel miffed for a moment. I won’t show it, just in case the others think it means more than it might. So much gossip. Nothing to it, I would never even prolong a conversation with a host. Soon she obviously begins to consider her gestures pointless and withdraws her hand. Then she is gone, I lose track of how because Greg is sat next to me, moving a bit.
What’s her name again? Someone asks.
We amble through another morning. It strikes me that everything, although it remains the same, is not. Not a novel idea. One that’s regular, when I think of myself thinking. I have the urge to write it down. Today is different. To write down: today is unusual. That would be odd too, to write as though my particular feeling might be worth recording and not to then write, today is different because I am writing down today is different. As though menial work—endless, taskless, almost pointless labour might be the subject, for noticing change. Not in this world or any before it, where people are employed to displace space and suffer the depredations of indirect danger.
Beside me sits Greg, his long aimless face caught by the illumination of the massive courtyard lamps that are being craned into place by engineers, readying for the opening. It lights him in such a way that I can perceive the fine details of his face, and that’s not good, as anyone who has had to have sex from the front will attest. He looks like a nice crocodile. The hairs growing from within his noise, curling their way out of his nostrils, the splayed pores of his cheeks, the wet edges of his lips, the shell in his eyes. Greg is bent, dripping into his food bowl, round shouldered, in his blue collared shirt, his clipped tie and his black hewn trousers, Museum logo stamped upon the arse cheek. His mouth trembles with each mouthful. A typical demoted intellectual, a less typical survivor, the opposite of that visitor host. Just grateful for food and lodgings and things to see. What he must have seen, people’s spread, the slow destruction of skeletons. Worse than me really. It’s certainly easier to be watched than watch. You can control the tempo etcetera. I don’t know. Something has affected him. It’s hard to escape seeing him all limp. He means well.
From Greg to the gates, all seems indebted to an awkward rampancy, an innocent success. Maybe it’s a weekend. We can see the public, like a raring set of harmless dogs. The queue is bunching here and there, through the railings. Once we were outside too. The materials seemed continual then, as though the Museum was fashioned as one piece and had always been so. That is the point. Just as Greg, and many of my other colleagues, seemed timeless when I first met them. A fatiguing thought, that these bags of jaws were once unknown to me.
This is an excerpt from MUEUM by SJ Fowler, published by Tenement Press. MUEUM is currently on the shortlist for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SJ Fowler is a writer and poet living in London. His collections include Fights (Veer Books, 2011), The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner (Eyewear Books, 2014), {Enthusiasm} (Test Centre, 2015), The Guide to Being Bear Aware (Shearsman Books, 2017), I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020) and The Great Apes (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). His work has become known for its exploration of the potential of poetry, alongside collaboration, curation, asemic writing, sound poetry, concrete poetry, and performance. He has been commissioned by institutions such as the Tate Modern, The Photographer’s Gallery, Wellcome Collection and Southbank Centre, and he has presented his work at over fifty international festivals, including Hay Xalapa, Mexico; Dhaka Lit Fest; Hay Arequipa, Peru; and the Niniti Festival, Iraq. Fowler was nominated for the White Review Short Story Prize, 2014, and his short stories have appeared in anthologies, such as Isabel Waidner’s edited collection, Liberating the Canon (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018).
By Jules Sprake.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jules Sprake has experimented with forms of printmaking and poetry, often starting with photographs of buildings or discarded objects to produce work that focuses on dis/connections between the parts. She is interested in the use of traditional printmaking techniques such as etching, cyanotype, salt print or lithography to process these photographs and poems. Sprake has recently exhibited from a series of work, Densities of Blank, at Impact 12: The Printmaker’s Voice and is a mentor with Koestler Arts. She has performed work for the European Poetry Festival and Printed Poetry Project.
By C. D. Rose.
Amy Arnold, Lori & Joe (Prototype, 2023)
You could argue, if you really wanted to, that the attempt to represent consciousness on the page is one of the things the novel is designed to do. Many, certainly, have tried. You’ll have your own list, no doubt, but it’ll probably include Joyce and Woolf, maybe Dorothy Richardson or Edouard Dujardin, Beckett even, or Proust arguably. And you’ll have your own opinion about whether interior monologue or stream of consciousness, or something else altogether, is the right term to use, or what the difference between them is. The techniques are often those associated with high modernism, but – thank goodness – it’s still a thing: Mike McCormack’s 2016 Solar Bones might be one example, and perhaps most notably there’s the work of Jon Fosse.
Amy Arnold’s first novel Slip of a Fish (And Other Stories, 2018) contained repeated references to Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire and while her graceful and unsettling new book, Lori & Joe, doesn’t reference the Norwegian writer directly, it shares many of his concerns, both stylistic and thematic.
Lori awakes one morning to find her life partner, Joe, has died unexpectedly. She doesn’t call a doctor, an ambulance, the police, or observe any of the rules, niceties or obligations which face you at the sudden onset of grief over a death unexpected. She pulls her boots on and goes out walking over the fell. That’s about as much plot as you’re going to get in this book, though there is of course much more to it. The novel is, as far as I can discern, circadian, in that its action takes place over the course of a day, but as Lori walks over the south Lakeland hills, her observation, memory and reflection open up that limited time frame, so that this becomes the story not of one single day, but of the accumulation of years.
While Lori’s internal voice (if we can characterise it so) is sometimes confused and confusing, this is because Lori won’t always acknowledge exactly what has happened to her, around her, and what she may have caused to happen. While we may be narrative animals, attempting to order and thereby explain our actions and our selves by means of creating a logical sequence for them, we are rarely successful at doing so. The lapses, evasions and blocks will never let us tell the full story, nor even perhaps know it.
In a way that might be troublesome for such a book, Lori however has little internality. You’d write a book of this kind to examine someone with a rich interior life, wouldn’t you? Arnold doesn’t. Lori is professedly unbookish, is left largely unmoved by the music (Bartók, Bach, Pārt) which Joe had loved so much and encouraged her to listen to, and doesn’t seem to even watch TV other than the perfunctory viewing of the news. Yet she is far from being a blank. Most of what she thinks, feels and remembers are her interactions with others. Though she is a very solitary person (crucially, with no children), conversations with others — partly real, partly imagined and remembered differently at every recall — make up who Lori is.
Lori’s initial apparent lack of interiority is also belied by her feeling for the landscape. As well as being about time and memory, Lori & Joe is also a book about place, though you will find no rhapsodic swells of new nature writing here, no purple passages about the storied beauty of the Lakes. The land is seen entirely from within that consciousness, close up. This is about being a body — and a streaming consciousness — in the landscape, the untouchable nature of the mind against rocks and rain and puddles and fog. And the importance of a good pair of boots.
In a recent review of Fosse’s work in the London Review of Books, Blake Morrison notes the counter-intuitive fact that Fosse’s style is actually very easy to read: ‘the prose is so repetitive and circling that the eye moves quickly down the page, unafraid of missing anything out since every new detail or revelation is sure to be dwelled on at length… what threatens to be heavy proves lightsome.’ It’s not quite the same with Arnold, partly because there are sentences, even though all are long and many of them break, but also because Arnold does require attention: it is precisely in those details, repeated and modified each time, that Lori’s story lies. The reader is aided by chapter-like segments, each headed with a comfortingly old-fashioned title telling the reader what’s going on (‘IT’S EARLY, IT ISN’T QUITE LIGHT, AND THE FOG IS DOWN OVER THE FELL,’ ‘LORI CLIMBS OVER THE STILE AT MOOR HEAD,’ ‘LORI LEANS AGAINST THE STONE WALL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BRIDLEWAY’.)
To say that this book is an experiment in the representation of consciousness, however, would be to do it a disservice. It is more than that, as any such (successful) experiment is bound to be. This is a small book, but not a minor one. Lori is a great example of the person-of-little-to-no-importance type. The style, like Lori, never draws attention to itself: it is understated, quietly brilliant. This is a book which is about what memory does to time, and what time does to memory. And in its successful representation of consciousness it is also about the crushing fear of loneliness, and the accumulation of time’s work, put alongside the pleasure of putting your feet in a puddle or eating a dry scone: the minuscule and the massive co-existing. This is a story of the ‘ordinary life’ presented to remind us that no life is ordinary.
The novel offers little comfort or closure, there are no epiphanies and revelations are scant, glimpsed only. And yet, it does show us what might it be like to exist on this earth, in all its conflict and wonder, even if only for a moment, as another person. This is, after all, one of the unique things that such writing can do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. D. Rose‘s three books The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and The Blind Accordionist form a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why. A collection of his short stories is forthcoming.
You can read an interview with him here. Twitter: @cdrose_write
By Wes Brown.
John Vercher, After the Lights Go Out (Pushkin Press, 2022)
In 1908, the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white defending champion Tommy Burns. In the words of Jack London, the bout was a “hopeless slaughter” and journalists called on former champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement to “wipe the smile from Johnson’s face”. Jeffries declared he would “reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race” and relieve the anxieties of white supremacists everywhere. In what was then billed as The Fight of The Century, Johnson defeated Jeffries, sparking race riots in which hundreds of black people were injured and a number killed. It was five years until Johnson dropped his belt to a white boxer, Jess Willard, with Johnson claiming he threw the fight in protest to the rage hurled at him. It would be another twenty years before an African American boxer was allowed to contend for the title.
The ‘great white hope’ trope has been repeated in fight films and novels alike, dramatizing fears of the other and offering wish-fulfilment fantasies for Caucasian audiences. Even in the Rocky films, it is Apollo Creed who Rocky must overcome as his first adversary. In Rocky Balboa (2006), The Italian Stallion comes out of retirement in his 50s to fight a brash black fighter and put him in his place. The franchise has since gone some way to rectify this with the Creed series, allowing black directors and black actors to tell their own stories. But in literature there has been a lack of black protagonists in fight fiction. While the stink of the ‘great white hope’ has lingered, Vercher’s After the Lights Go Out is not so much a counterpunch to the trope as a knockout blow, a slow-burning noir thriller disguised as a sports drama about identity, memory and race. It is a contender to the crown of a canon that has not always been so welcoming.
When MMA biracial fighter Xavier ‘Scarecrow’ Wallace finds himself lined up for a number-one contenders fight after years as a journeyman and failing a drugs test (not his fault), he sees his chance for glory. But the problem is he’s absorbed too much punishment, his brain pin-balled across his skull too many times and like his father he’s beginning to forget who he was. Xavier’s central conflict arises from his divided and dissolving identity: everything he once held certain, black or white, appears to be disappearing. His white father, Sam, has Alzheimer’s and is confined to a care home. He was once married to Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, a black woman who abandoned her family when Xavier was a child. Sam was once the kind of ‘colour blind’ white liberal who said he didn’t care if people were, “Black, yellow, purple or green” and make jokes about his wife’s ethnicity, only to laugh away his remarks:
He’d pinch her behind and tell her that despite her dark skin, he could see her at night just fine with his own baby blues. She laughed, but not in a way that said she found it funny.
Now suffering from dementia, he is finding it harder to conceal his racist inclinations. Still, Xavier is shocked when nurses report his dad has been racially abusing staff. Xavier is taken aback. They mean to say the man with a biracial son, who was married to a black woman is capable of racism? Xavier doesn’t believe it until he uses the n-word to describe him. “That man back there. . .” he says, “I don’t know that man.”
As a white reader, After The Lights Go Out is at its best when it makes you question your own certainties and prejudices. Vercher is careful to avoid being too didactic: this is a noirish world where nothing is black and white. Even Xavier’s mother, Evelyn, who veers close to being a sermonising voice in the novel, is not beyond fighting dirty (years of experience of racism have seen to that). She offers him the possibility of reconciliation, though if Xavier can take that is a different matter. There’s short shrift for white liberals like Sam who engage in ‘hipster’ racism: using their privilege to tell ‘ironic’ racist jokes that couldn’t possibly be so because they’re ‘too self-aware’, the kind where the butt of the satire tends to be less privileged white people who are the ‘real’ racists. Humour can be transgressive and bond people, though the line between a joke about racism and a joke that is racist is often unclear. The novel gets deep into the moral complexities of identity. What is black? What is white? Who has the authenticity to decide?
In one delicious scene, Xavier encounters Shot’s latest white MMA prodigy in the gym. Lawrence is a rising star, unaware that he’s fodder Shot can build to help him throw fights. Lawrence is a jumped-up white guy with cornrows, full of sneering, upstart braggadocio who claims to be “Blacker” than the more cerebral Xavier. Lawrence reminds Xavier of the “white boys” he went to High School with who imitated black rappers so unflatteringly they put on a “modern-day minstrelshow” and told Xavier that he listened to “white music” and talked “all proper” because his black mother taught college English. In defending his pride, Xavier goes too far and the dark inner voice takes over during sparring:
An image flashed across his mind’s eye Lawrence’s face leaking blood from openings both natural and not. And Xavier wanted to make the image real.
Xavier puts a beating on Lawrence but forces himself into an impossible position. Shot has his own underworld dealings and without his pawn in place, Xavier is forced to repay him: throw his match or suffer the consequences as he spirals downwardly into post-concussive oblivion, unable to ascertain who his father really was and who he’s fighting for. After The Lights Go Out is not the kind of sports drama where conflicts are resolved by athletic prowess. Inside the octagon might be where the last of Xavier is most together: unleashing his ID, in gales of ultra-violence but where the maelstrom of his doubt and self-destruction is most fierce. In the run-up to his fight, as the inner whispers grow louder, his identity crisis threaten a loss of control. Battles within the cage are merely microcosms of the power struggles without. This is knockout artistry as consciousness raising.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wes Brown teaches creative writing at the University of East London. His autobiographical novel about pro wrestling, Breaking Kayfabe, will be published by Bluemoose in 2023.
By Andrew Flinn and Astrid von Rosen.
Sven Lindquist, Dig Where You Stand: How to Research Your Job, tr. Ann Henning Jocelyn (Repeater Books, 2023)
Finally the long-awaited English translation of Sven Lindqvist’s key activist research manual and manifesto Gräv där du står / Dig Where You Stand has arrived! When first published in Swedish in 1978 the book was a critical intervention into the conflict between the competing narratives of workers’ histories and more dominant and pervasive elite histories. Today the book makes for a powerful entry into the urgent and pressing task of critically addressing the increasingly complex, painfully precarious work conditions of human lives in global-local economies, as well as for all “barefoot researchers” working to research and write counter-histories which challenge other dominant and often exclusionary narratives.
Digging as Workers’ Inquiry
The central idea underpinning Dig Where You Stand is that doing history work is a necessary and significant contributory factor in achieving social, political and industrial change, and indeed in fashioning a new world. The book conveys the key idea that everyone — not just academics — can learn how to (and benefit from) critically and rigorously explore history, especially their own. It provides clear, comprehensive and engaging instructions on how everyone can systematically research the history of their workplace and industry, employ a multiplicity of sources (official records as well as more informal oral and personal sources) in a critical fashion and choose research methods relevant to the subject of the research. It instructs the reader how to formulate and pose urgent and critical research questions — questions about power and the lived legacies of the past in the present still relevant today — and provides the researcher with the tools to research and answer those questions. Without a proper question, you are ill-equipped to enter the archive and commence the act of research, warns Lindqvist, and you will get lost. Today, in our global precarious economy, and the resulting indeterminate archives, the warning is more relevant than ever.
Dig Where You Stand prompts workers to become researchers, to follow the money and the power it represents, confers and reproduces. It invites them to take on the role as experts on their job and industry and “dig” out its hidden histories to produce a new picture and understanding of that industry and their position within it as a vital step towards social and economic transformation.
Written in an engaging and clear language that everyone can understand, Dig Where You Stand challenges the arbitrary and harmful boundaries between the public and the academy, workers and experts, “amateur” and “professional” researchers. In so doing, Dig Where You Stand was aligning itself with a long-standing intellectual and political tradition. Lindqvist himself described the roots of workers “digging” being located in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (“Wo du stehst, grab tiefhinein!” / “Where you stand, dig in deeply”) and also in practices undertaken after the Russian and Chinese revolutions (Lindqvist 2014). Digging practice has also strong echoes of the “Workers’ Inquiry” advocated by Marx and the Workers’ Enquiry movement in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the approach encouraged by inter-war Pan-Africanists like Arthur Schomburg for African Americans to dig up their past (McAllister 2022, Wright 2017, Schomburg 1925).
According to Lindqvist, experts (academics, industrial leaders and the likes) are not to be automatically feared and deferred to, because a worker is the expert on their job. Lindqvist concludes his preface, “That is why your own job is such a good starting point for your research. Dig where you stand!” These short and to-the-point sentences neatly capture what we argue is a key distinguishing feature in and for Dig Where You Stand, namely embodied and situated action. Making “your own job” the point of departure in becoming a researcher, Lindqvist firmly grounds and situates the practitioner (in his case, the cement worker) in real life, material space and the human body. When adding the imperative “dig where you stand!”, this research stance is charged with a call to take action, enter the explorative stage empowered as practitioner-scholar, and to do so without shame and fear.
In line with previous as well as current perspectives in feminist research, Lindqvist’s real-life case studies situate, embody and visualise rather than merely describe how workers (and other communities) can on their own or in collaboration with others create this “new picture” and use it as tool for change. His exposition of politically engaged and counter-history-making is still known and acts as an inspiration to many interested in radical history practices within social movement and activist environments today (see for instance the international History from Below network and the influence of Dig, “a mass history movement” (Ball and Box, 2015)).
Starting by looking out from one’s local setting to the world and ending with a vision of the future (set sometime in the 2020s) where activist scholars collaborate with academics to work for social change, the book’s thirty chapters of “materials and methods, which anyone can use to trace their own history and that of their workmates”, together create a montage of possible ways to explore a job and the workplace. History is set in motion in a multitude of dynamic and critically fruitful approaches engaging oral history, visual analysis, archival research, memory work, spatial explorations and critical reflection. The results of such research could be equally dynamic, with Lindqvist warning that “research is not mainly a defensive but an offensive weapon. It’s more suited for conquest than for defence.
By Christiana Spens.
The following is an extract from Christiana Spens‘s The Fear (Repeater Books, 2023)
The day before my father died, I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris with my boyfriend. At that time, I had been living in Paris, subletting short-term from my old landlord, and we were in a long-distance relationship. I was also going back and forth to Scotland a lot, for my course, and also to see my dad. We’d spend time in museums and cafes, when my boyfriend was around, stretching out our free tickets and expensive espressos, to fill the frozen, bright days.
We went to the exhibition in the morning, which I was reviewing for a magazine. I knew my father was ill, but I didn’t know quite how bad things were. There had been so many scares before that I had begun to not really believe it could ever happen. I was waiting to find out whether I needed to book flights back, though, whether it could really be that bad, when we went.
We walked around, trying to be normal, but death loomed anyway; a stark crow in the otherwise green and pristine Luxembourg Gardens; window displays of eerie candles and flower arrangements. I tried to concentrate on work — I was trying to get as much finished as I could in case I had to leave Paris — but even my work was all about death, it turned out.
We took the Metro from Montmartre to the Grand Palais, an imposing building surrounded by decorative gardens and busy roads, and random police marching around. It was eerie and dark inside, like a mausoleum. Women in veils and latex, dying flowers and bowed heads. Fur and lipstick and Irish hair, props and faces lit to seem as blank as sculptures from Ancient Greece. A large white, minimal cross on the wall, next to all the other crucifixes and dying roses. A figure in a blank hood.
There were Polaroids that Mapplethorpe had taken in the 1970s and formal black-and-white portraits of the artist and his friends. He had created a system of iconography that embraced S&M and Catholicism at once, in this pursuit of true beauty. There were classical, sculptural nudes and arrangements of flowers. “I am looking for perfection in form”, he was quoted as having said, his words on the wall of the museum. “I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”1 He lined up Saints and rent-boys, celebrities and Michelangelo. Striving for transcendence, perfection and immortality, he had developed an aesthetic, spiritual code in these figures, flowers and icons. He had re-appropriated religious iconography to show how art and sex were his own religion. He had written a letter to Patti Smith: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together” (1). There was Robert and a skull, Robert in drag. Robert with a cigarette. Robert living with/dying from AIDS.
But his photographs betrayed none of these struggles. Instead, they were an altar to his idols and ideals, beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness, success and failure. He had used art to transcend, to go beyond struggle and fear, to assert his own ideals in spite of the doubt he must have felt or experienced from other people, and the fear of his own they betrayed. By transforming images of death, sex and himself so that he triumphed, transcendent and by turning what seemed pornographic into a form in the language of Michelangelo, he sought redemption not only from personal, spiritual dilemmas, but from life itself, and the fear of death that implied.
The nudes are so still, I wrote down, sitting on a bench in front of them, that they cannot be alive and, of course, frozen in time and a photograph, they are not. The flowers seem to be placed as carefully as funeral arrangements. The little altar, with images of Jesus’ crucifixion, together with the lines and lines of photographs of Mapplethorpe’s friends and idols, complete the reconstruction of a fantastical funeral. He has reconciled with doubt, pain and death; he has created his own meticulously executed send-off.
We walked out of the exhibition, out of the darkness. Outside, the pond shone turquoise and shallow, with statues and tourists in the distance, and a froth of fine algae at the bottom. I sat on a chair by the pond and smiled and smiled, and my boyfriend took a picture of me. We were both wearing black, and my skull scarf flickered against my skin in the breeze. I had not picked out these things intentionally.
After being in such dim light before, I was surprised by the brightness of the sun outside, the fresh green of the gardens and trees we walked through, after the soft tones of marble and spot-lit flesh and bone. We walked on to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where the pathways were covered in fine cream gravel. I heard a strange noise as we walked that I couldn’t quite place — a lone cry — and looked around to see what it was. I saw a single black crow, seeming oblivious to the people straying around, standing still on a spot of the lawn, continuing to make its odd, eerie cry, beak open, towards the sky. “Isn’t that creepy?” I said, and my boyfriend nodded and we kept walking. It had seemed so incongruous there, in the green and the sun, as tourists in neutral travel clothes wandered around nearby.
We had just come back from the Mapplethorpe exhibition when my mother phoned and told me how bad things were. “He’s not getting better”, she said. I had been so used to being told he was dying that it didn’t seem fully possible as a reality. But I booked flights to Scotland for the next day, anyway, in a daze. By the time we got home, he was gone.
***
There was a nervous atmosphere at home, with people sitting around, waiting for the funeral to happen. Death seemed unexpectedly public; everyone knew about it. He had been ill for such a long time, during which we had often been ignored or looked down on as a family, mainly because financial problems had followed illness so swiftly.
He had, to me, died very slowly and gradually, and detached from the outside world. The grief was therefore dispersed over the years, but no one had seemed very involved until this point, in which he had physically gone, which seemed in some ways quite arbitrary. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it entirely, but at times it felt good that I was finally allowed to be proud of him, to tell people what he was like, to be allowed the ritual of death. The illness had become a strange spectre, before — haunting us all with the imminence of death, the Fear — but now that tension faded, and in a strange way it brought him back to me, more fully, in essence. A spirit distilled, managed, sort of. As if grief can be bottled, memories saved, legacies controlled.
In the week or so before the funeral, so many flowers were delivered that they took up every surface: lilies, their scent pervading over every other, white roses of various shapes and arrangements. They covered everything: a large dinner table, side tables, sideboards, a dresser, two desks. They arrived in cellophane and paper, with sad notes from friends. So much white, but occasionally some purple, from a thistle, the dark green stalks and long, winding leaves. When all the vases were used up, I found other things, jugs and glasses, to put them in. We bought a couple more vases as well. I took most of the leaves off the stems, cut them down, arranged them between the vases.
As the days went on, I plucked out the dead ones as they wilted, rearranged the bouquets with those flowers missing, merging them together. Cutting stalks, refilling water, bundling all of the cellophane and ribbons into rubbish bins. There was so much clearing up, cutting things away. I thought of Mapplethorpe, the flowers he had photographed. I imagined the actual process that had gone into them. How many flowers had he bought, for a photograph of one? What did all the waste look like, scattered around his studio? What did he do with the leftover flowers, and the flowers he’d finished photographing, when he was done with them? Or did he just discard them, decadently, or busily, efficiently, entirely focused on the art at the end? Why had he not photographed more dead flowers, decaying things, why this stark purity?
I thought of those flowers again — his entwined white tulips and star-like orchids and sensual, begging lilies. The dark and light, the harmony and yet the desire, pushing through. I thought of them over and over, as they flickered in my mind, and somehow, it quietened my despair.
Robert Mapplethorpe took me by the hand, and perhaps my father did too — gave me lilies and roses, morbid confetti. I tried to capture the flowers before they died. I photographed each one, recording their gradual wilting, as they flopped and fell. After I had taken so many, I put the photographs away, hid them, and tried to live.
(1) Patti Smith, Just Kids, Ecco Press, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiana Spens is an academic, writer and artist based in London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, and before that read Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and several other books. She writes regularly for publications such as Prospect, The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly and Studio International on politics and culture, and is a founding member of Truth Tellers, based at Kings College London.
On Friday 7 April, at 7 PM, in a brownstone garden, 1239 will host a clutch of 3:AM Magazine writers, who will present what they please.
Jackson Arn
Zach Issenberg
Harris Lahti
Tom Laplaige
Christopher Urban
Basic spirits provided; communal contributions welcome. Things may go late.
For the street address in Brooklyn, write to [email protected] or message @MarkdeSilva1 on twitter. Asking around may also work.
By Jesse Kominers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesse Kominers lives in Peniche with his daughter, Elsa. His first book, ancestress, is forthcoming from FATHOM.
By Grant Maierhofer.
Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman, 2008
I don’t know why but I’m still affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t know him, and I don’t think I’ve even seen all of his work, but his presence is so affecting to me. He doesn’t look like an actor. He struggled with addiction. He got sober young and relapsed. It scares me.
In Charlie Kaufman’s film we probably have his best work, playing a director putting on productions that grow from Death of a Salesman to an impossibly large thing, but in the ninth minute of the film we just have him talking to his doctor. The doctor asks if he means right as in morally correct or as in accurate. Hoffman’s Caden Cotard says he doesn’t know, maybe accurate, and then we’re with these two for a moment, this awkward moment between someone who is hyper aware of themselves and his doctor, and although there’s always that temptation to simply state anything to keep an appointment moving along, that doesn’t happen, and suddenly both men are forced to sit and think, and it’s uncomfortable but warm.
And then we have Cotard watching his production of Death of a Salesman in dress rehearsal, and Willie Loman is delivering his speech to his son who walks off in the middle of the scene about football. He realizes his son has gone and goes to his car, the car crashes into the house and in the production a piece of architecture hits Michelle Williams’ character, so Cotard goes to check on her. It’s clear there’s a budding romance between them.
In the midst of this Cotard says it’s too late in the game to be having these problems. At around nine minutes into the film it feels fine to link that with the movie itself. Or it’s Cotard’s life, and it’s the place wherein he can express his frustration over the ongoing problems that are consuming him — his family, his health, his work, his identity — and his frustration is the same as Willie’s, then, the father trying to wax poetically about the importance of the big game, and these big moments, who lashes out by crashing his car, as Cotard lashes out at the crash itself and everything breaking down around him.
Two protagonists, then, a mumbling Everyman who is subjected to the average medical appointment wherein he gives up everything to find out what’s happening, only to be stopped with a quandary about the differences between moral rightness and simply being correct; and a theater director late in preparations for a play about the lateness of living and the world moving on whether or not we’d like it to, lashing out but then laughing and embracing the small comforts of a tryst with the starring actress.
It’s interesting because there are moments in this film I find physically painful to watch. There’s a moment when Hoffman’s character is putting together this massive production in a warehouse the size of the city and it becomes so introspective that I can hardly bear to look at it. I think I chose Synecdoche for a piece of criticism like this because I knew it wouldn’t mean I’d have to watch the entire film again, and I don’t know what that says about me or about the work, to be simultaneously drawn towards something and its creator but not to be so drawn towards it that I want to simply watch it over and over again and can even comfortably do so.
I watch Synecdoche every year or every couple of years or so. I get caught up in different elements, most recently Olive’s (Cotard’s daughter) tattoos—I liked the idea of trying to replicate them on myself as a way of forever connecting with the film. I don’t even know if it’s something I’d say I like in a typical application of that term. There are artworks that I like, and artworks that I even love, and then there are those perhaps I need, or have needed, and this film would fit in there, where its aesthetic rendering of certain preoccupations of the creator align perfectly with my own thinking.
We get the whiffs of the rest of the film here, in minute 9, the sense of frustration the outside world can often impose on people driven by aesthetics, and the awkward lives such people lead whenever they’re not in their various temples. The sense of bliss that’s double-edged when Cotard is in his temple and everything’s not entirely perfect, and the predilection people in these situations have for simply telling jokes or laughing, because to name anything else too exactly might hinder the experience of everyone involved. The presence of the director, too, in Cotard but also in Kaufman: imposings upon imposings upon imposings. In his review of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Roger Ebert made the point that even fictional films are a sort of documentary about the actors performing in these films, which I think also nicely expresses the layerings of influence and performance in Synecdoche, New York.
In the realm of the practical, then, i.e., the doctor’s office, this artist is useless; he’s mumbling and unsure and evasive. The doctor, comparatively, is comfortable and incisive, commenting on Cotard’s observation and moving around it without much in the way of anxiety or reservation. In the theater, though, Cotard isn’t bashful, or unsure, and responds quickly to a potential injury with the same speed we’d hope a doctor might exercise in a similar situation. The film itself seems to also be about the growth of an aesthetic life to the extent it almost becomes unwieldy, where people viewing the warehouse much later in Synecdoche, New York couldn’t help but ask why, and wonder at the role this kind of production might play in living. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t happen. Everybody there is committed, even if they’re asking their director why, and he can’t offer much in response. Living beats Cotard down, as does the work, but here, there’s still a fire and a determination to see this production through, to make it unique and to make it expressive and powerful. The wavering in the doctor’s office gives way to certitude and drive.
Something I struggle with with film in particular is the desire to take it in in any order I’d like. I hear about readers who read the end of a book first, and I’ve read some things piecemeal and never entirely through, and the distinctions with film seem arbitrary enough or at least made so by television and our screens, where films are broken into pieces anyway. Oddly, too, it seems natural, so when I rewatch this ninth minute consciously I feel as though I’m engaging in a criticism most in line with my natural aesthetic position, the one where I’m no longer carving out large swathes of time to watch one film from beginning to end, or reading much work that seems to demand a kind of attention that now feels unnatural, for better or worse.
Most of us don’t like to visit the doctor, and I think it has to do with the forfeiture of authority. In this situation, the doctor has indicated that the eyes are part of the brain, and Hoffman’s character suggests that this just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem entirely right, and it’s left there, with the moral question pursued and the usage question, rather than resolving it, and this leads to the dress rehearsal and the shift where Cotard is now the authority, and in his position of authority he behaves not unlike a doctor in an emergency. A flirtatious doctor, and a theater director who’s able to treat his work with an utmost seriousness, which again preoccupies me.
I don’t know why, but I find myself thinking most these days about the question of art and what it’s for. Emil Cioran wrote about there being something wonderful in the pursuit of doing something that’s entirely useless. To pursue something that is useless as opposed to doing any of the countless other things a person might do could have a kind of honor to it. And the world wants to tell us which things are useful and which things are useless. But the longer I live — and certainly this is a film to be lived with — the more I feel it’s inadequate to think of art as useless, unless we’re willing to go all the way. All the way in or all the way out, and this film feels like someone going all the way in to see what’s there.
It’s an art that’s so grand that it feels comfortable to look at it with pity, a space where an artist puts everything in front of you, and takes that gesture quite seriously, and your reaction to it — like any reaction to any vulnerability — inevitably communicates the most about where you’re at, and that’s okay, too.
I’ve just watched the ninth minute one more time, from a few seconds before to a few seconds after, and I think there’s something to watching or taking in certain works of art in this manner. For some people, Synecdoche, New York is too much to bear in its entirety all at once. I don’t know why I’m that sort of person, but I think it’s true. Looking at this, though, and thinking about the whole of it, and what I like and dislike and love and hate about it, I’m certain it’s a work of art. I used to say that Paris, Texas was my favorite film. Probably, in part, because I thought this made me sound cooler than I am, and partly because, when I first watched it, about forty minutes in, the sentence “this is my favorite film” came into my mind. It’s odd because I don’t sit around excited to watch that film, and I doubt I’ve even seen it more than ten times, but it’s similar to Synecdoche, New York in that I know it affects me deeply, and there’s something in it that resonates so much with me that I actually find it hard to watch. I have no doubt that Wenders’ film would lend itself quite well to this sort of viewing experience. Piecemeal, split up, with the pressure lessened. I don’t know what any of this means.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Maierhofer is the author of Ebb, most recently, and a forthcoming book from Inside the Castle whose title is too long to include here.
By Tom La Farge.
Now by the swelling of things
and the empty din of phrases
students have reached this point,
that when they come into court,
they think they have been carried
into another world.
– Petronius, Satyricon, 1
Fellini starts exactly here, at the swelling of things that transfers us to another world, the empire of rhetoric, populated by the grotesque, ornate, far-fetched, hysterical figures by which rhetoric is said to denature true language, purus sermo; but Fellini’s figures are human.
They lend themselves to the powerful man, to amplify his discourse, himself, his position, his central importance as declamator, yet turn aside to eat, to kiss, to stare into the camera that meets their steady eye at their eye-level.
Red sky lowers, rubor of inflamed language, above a furrowed waste where a poet, lying imagining dying, ‘bequeathes’ to Encolpio, student of literature, everything absent from this scene: the seasons, the earth, rivers, sea, sky.
Strapped down in a covered cart, an unsatisfiable woman, who speaks in moans and pantings, in eye-widenings and flicks of the tongue, is wheeled for a cure to the cave of a hermaphrodite: inert,
bloodless, semidivine, unarousable, a magnet for this film’s most monstrously lopped or twisted or
swollen figures.
Contours everywhere bloat, warp, explode, and the paradigm of shape is the meats carried out from Trimalchio’s ovens, swollen or burst in a spiky splay of blackened limbs: rhetoric’s distention,
disruption of the envelope.
Rhetoric encloses every setting by dropping a ceiling, or else the enreddened sky, and wrapping walls around, some built, some natural like rockfaces, but all overpainted or inscribed or mottled like tissue, to encyst a swelling performance.
In Vernacchio’s theater a plump, masked comedian frisks and farts, while an axe crops a peasant’s hand; later Caesar is mocked, but the performance hasn’t begun until Encolpio, student of literature, interrupts the play to demand his catamite, Gitone, until Vernacchio raises his mask to implore the camera.
Lica the pirate with the staring glass eye, so much larger and whiter than its fellow, humiliates his prisoner Encolpio by forcing him first to wrestle in the lamplit hold, and next, on deck, to stand up as bridegroom beside Lica, the happy, saffron-veiled bride, in nuptials that Lica’s crew joyfully celebrates till joined by a boarding party of legionaires, fresh come from assassinating Caesar (who stabbed himself first, to be sure, but no blood flowed till the soldiers plied their spears); they strike off Lica’s head, which, sinking, stares pleadingly at the camera through undulant thicknesses of ocean.
The camera tilts up to view the new Caesar passing in triumph, preceded and followed by bunched spears, eagles in demonic spread, bristling crests, and the turreted shapelessness of elephants, blocking a flat, bright sky that mutes their features (but Caesar’s haunted eyes engage the camera) but limns their figures, stark and spiky as Trimalchio’s meats.
Standing before a classically proportioned villa, a handsome paterfamilias, his wife demurely to one side, frees grateful slaves and dispatches his children to safety, promising one disquietingly beautiful daughter, whose eyes suggest precocious knowledge of cameras, to join her the very next day, but this scene, which for a while looks like an image of the normal to set against the monstrosities, a vision of chaste language, is set in a courtyard entirely enclosed by pure façade, a rockface, and a stand of weird white hedge: another theater, therefore, to the center of which the noble Roman moves, and he slits his wrists, his wife too somehow dying, and later someone arranges the bodies on a pyre as fine as Dido’s.
The theaters of rhetoric are linked by the narrative labyrinth through which Encolpio must travel and meet monsters, factitious ordeals, the monsters merely monstrous figures in the discourse; so that ‘Minotauro,’ for instance, who nearly kills him to the rhythmic heckling of spectators lining the bluffs surrounding the sandy waste containing the maze where Encolpio and ‘Minotauro’ strike, dodge, and blindly stalk. ‘Minotauro’ turns out to have a soft spot for students of literature and swears friendship, cheerfully unmasking, just an actor in the festival of Mirth, which demands the ridiculing of a stranger, accomplished then in stylized mockery, with the result that Encolpio is unmanned and cannot service the waiting Arianna, to his deep humiliation.
The birching of his buttocks by women who insouciantly chant cryptic syllables, some formula of remasculation, while he lies rigid on a quilt of pubic triangles on a raked bed of sand, an elephant in the background, while more women gaze out of windows and Ascilto, his lover, swings overhead, jeering, on a circus trapeze swollen to the dimensions of a small stage where yet more women voluptuously loll, fails in the restoration of Encolpio’s virility, not to be regained till he couples with the meaty Enotea, an event he celebrates by running rejoicing through a meadow by a river under an open sky, the first natural setting in the film. But when Ascilto sinks and dies, Encolpio kneels in a final elegiac burst, inducing a sudden shot of desert; and the sky goes red.
But then he sets sail for Africa with freed slaves, while old men sit on the shore, stolidly staring into the camera as they chew a dead man’s flesh to gain his legacy. The student of literature travels, so he tells us, to undiscovered cities, shedding his narrative in a final figure of ekphrasis, wall-paintings on the fragments of the labyrinth, between which the open sky appears, figuring freedom, the receding emptiness that lends no screen to rhetoric’s feverish projections.
Sound like Fellini to you?
Balls! Tumor rerum is Fellini’s matter, ‘sky’ his climactic figure: O altitudo!, a commonplace invoking a ‘height’ of meaning beyond the power of syntax to express, acknowledging the limits of the rhetor’s power, the infinite margin to his page, but slily, by that very gesture, inscribing it.
Rhetoric is disingenuous, a teachable trick, its craft the invention of figures, but in an exhausted world, if the world is ever anything but exhausted, when language has crystallized in figures, if language ever is ‘liquid,’ figures need to be invented, the further-fetched the better, because maybe they can fetch us back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom La Farge (1947-2020) was a novelist, educator, and publisher who lived in Brooklyn, New York. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including The Crimson Bears (Sun & Moon Press), Zuntig (Green Integer), and The Enchantments Trilogy (Spuyten Duyvil). He was also was the editor of Proteotypes, a small press based in Brooklyn. An award now bears his name.
By John L. Williams.
A Preamble
Harry Crews was the last great proponent of the Southern Gothic — possessor of a blazing talent, whether displayed in a dozen fine novels, some outstanding longform journalism or an indelible memoir, A Childhood. This last has just been paid the deserved tribute of reissue as a Penguin Classic. Crews’ star, a decade after his death, is once more in the ascendant.
In 1995 I travelled to Harry’s home in Gainesville, Florida, to interview him for the Observer Magazine, to tie in with the UK release of his latest novel, The Mulching of America. However, the publication date got pushed back by a year and so the piece never ran. I didn’t know it then, but there would be no more significant work from Harry Crews after I spoke to him. Sadly he suffered ever-worsening health until his death in 2012. So I think this profile stands as an only slightly premature eulogy: an eyewitness account of the dying fall of Harry Crews.
***
‘Young pussy and dope,’ says Harry Crews, most singular of American writers, ‘that’s the answer.’ I have to say I’m not sure what the question was. The secret of prolonged youth, perhaps. The key to literary immortality maybe. More likely there wasn’t a question at all. But that’s what Crews tells me the answer is, as he pads across his living room, and lowers himself into his chair, ready to start talking.
Harry Crews, it scarcely needs saying, is an unapologetically macho individual. Born and raised in Georgia, Crews worked as a marine, a pulp mill labourer and a tomato picker before turning novelist. Today he has acquired a reputation as a literary hellraiser that makes Norman Mailer look like an Ivy League dilettante. But the legend of ‘Harry Crews — tattooed wild man of American literature’ has not been all to the good, tending as it has to obscure the real quality of his fiction. For Harry Crews is to the novel what Diane Arbus is to photography: a celebrant of the freakish and the outlandish, the sad and the mad — an American original.
It’s taken me a while to be sat here in Harry Crews’ living room in Gainesville, Florida. Last time I tried I was en route from Miami to Jacksonville Florida, where I had a date with a serial killer’s fiancée, so it seemed a good idea to detour via Gainesville to talk to Harry Crews. I phoned from Miami to check he would be there. No problem. I arrived at Gainsville airport, caught a cab to the address, walked down a short drive to a house almost engulfed by the surrounding woods, and found a note on the door saying, ‘UNAVOIDABLY CALLED AWAY. CREWS.’
This time his publisher told me it would be different. Harry was mortified about what happened last time. It’s just that his dog/aged relative was sick/very ill/dead, and it wouldn’t happen again. This time, I called from New Orleans, I called from Pensacola, I called from Tallahassee. Even then, I was palpably relieved when, after a pause of no more than half a minute, the big wooden door of Harry Crews’ house opened.
The first thing that strikes you on meeting Harry Crews is that physically he is not the man he used to be. The photos on the jackets of his first books show a clean-cut ex-marine with a confident grin and a forehead and chin that look to have been hacked out of granite. Later photos show a man who practically defines grizzled, with a prominent tattoo sporting a skull above an epigram derived from ee cummings, ‘How Do You Like Your Blue Eyed Boy, Dr Death?’, and his eyes squinting out through a mass of scar tissue below a forehead as cro-magnon as ever.
But, at sixty, the past couple of years have treated Crews hard. His knee, already damaged in a motorcycle accident, cracked under him and the resultant months with his leg in the air means that Crews is still forced to hobble around the house. He has the look of a man unhappy in his body, betrayed by the weakness of the flesh.
And, as we start to talk, it seems that it’s not only his physical fitness he has doubts about. Crews seems hard put to find a cheerful topic of conversation, be it the publishing industry, editors, American politics, or his own sales figures. Yet given his start in life, it’s remarkable that he should still be alive at all, let alone producing work that is still far more interesting than ninety per cent of what comes out.
Crews was born in Bacon County, Georgia, at the end of a long dirt road, into the kind of rural poverty that is almost unimaginable now, the kind of poverty amid which the prospect of starving to death was an everyday reality. ‘It was a little enclave of real peasants,’ Crews told me, ‘men who lived with very little margin of error, who were out of time even then.’
His childhood was a troubled one, marked by illness and domestic instability. Only his mother remained a constant and positive presence. His escape route was a traditional one: reading. Reading matter for the young Crews consisted of the Sears Catalogue, an illustrated cornucopia of goods that families like his could only goggle at. So rather than use the catalogue as a shopping tool, Harry, as he recalls in his autobiography, A Childhood: The Biography Of A Place, used the catalogue as a jumping-off point for fantasy, spinning tales around the models.
I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts… Young as I was, though, I had known for a long time that it was all a lie. I knew that under those fancy clothes there had to be scars, there had to be swellings and boils of one kind or another because there was no other way to live in the world…. And it was out of this knowledge that I first began to make up stories about the people I found in the catalogue. (A Childhood)
A Childhood is both Crews’ best and darkest work. It’s all here: the three men he called daddy — the blood daddy who died when he was two, the bad step-daddy who drank and fought and shot at his mother, and his uncle Alton, the good daddy who imparted to Crews his unyielding sense of what it is to be a man. And at the heart of the story is an accident all too typical of such a harsh and unforgiving upbringing.
‘When I was six I fell in a vat of boiling water that we’d been using for scalding hogs,’ Crews recalls. ‘We didn’t have enough money for me to go to hospital so the doc came out, put a buggy frame around my bed to keep the sheets from touching my skin, and ran a light into this kind of hut from an outside power line. The heat of the lamp made my skin come off everywhere. People would come from all around just to see me. I think I learned then what it is to be a freak in people’s eyes.’
And when Crews grew up there was only one way he was headed and that was out of Bacon County. The marines beckoned, particularly as Crews was possessed of a talent that would smooth his path through a life in the forces: ‘I spent much of my young manhood in the ring fighting. If you can box in the marines you get to avoid a lot of other things. You never have to do guard duty, never have to do that wretched shit in the kitchens, just as long as you can bloody up another boy, stand on top of him and crow like a rooster. I was a light heavyweight, I lost two fights and won 33. I liked fighting I liked the one-on-one-ism of it. A good fighter should be like a good pit bulldog, shouldn’t mind the blood’.
When he came out of the marines, Crews took advantage of the GI Bill to go to college at the University of Florida in Gainesvile. By then he was sure that there was one thing he wanted to do and that was to write. But college bored him and after two semesters, this being the height of the beatnik era, Crews decided to take off and see America: ‘I got on my 650cc Triumph, I was gone 17 months and put about 17 thousand miles on the bike. Went to Canada, San Francisco, the Rockies, down to Mexico, across from El Paso to New Orleans. I could cook and tend bar and that meant I could work in any city in this country the day I arrived there’.
When he returned from his travels Crews went back to college and finished his degree. ‘In my senior year I met the only wife I’ve ever had, Sally. That marriage lasted until 1972 and I’ve been without a wife since. She’s a wonderful woman, a marvellous mother and all those things. I figured that if I couldn’t live with her, I couldn’t live with anyone.’
Then two momentous events in Crews’ life occurred. The first of them was a purely terrible event. Crews’ first son, Patrick, drowned in a neighbour’s swimming pool, a month before his fourth birthday. The second was the realisation of his great ambition, with a publisher’s acceptance of his first and finest novel, The Gospel Singer, a story of freaks and fraudulent saints, a backwoods Faust.
The Gospel Singer‘s acceptance was the payoff for ten years of hard work, rewarded only by the publication of two stories in literary magazines. It was well reviewed on publication, in 1968, and, crucially, it led his alma mater, the University of Florida, to offer him a job, teaching Creative Writing in the English Department. It was a great job — good money, not much teaching, plenty of time to write — a novelist’s dream.
And for a while things went very well indeed. His second book, 1969’s Naked in Garden Hills — a North Florida epic that saw him moving from the Southern Gothic of his first novel to the trailer park surrealism he made his own — received the best reviews of his career. Further funny, weird novels like Karate is a Thing of the Spirit, Car and The Gypsy’s Curse, appeared on a more or less annual basis though the early seventies. What connects them is their concern with people most of us see simply as freaks: a midget jockey, a band of karate nazis, a man who decides to eat a car.
‘If you’ve been around carnivals,’ comments Crews, ‘as I have, working on the freak shows, you’ll realise that most of us carry our abnormalities or perversities or whatever on the inside, and so are able to lead what people call a “normal life”. But if you’re three feet tall you can’t do that, if you’re a lady and you’ve got a beard, you can’t do that — for around every corner you turn you’ll meet somebody that’s a mirror to reflect back the improbable grossness of your condition. I see such people as having special consideration under the Lord. I’ve always been fascinated by what they have to go through.’
The prestige gained by Crews’ steady stream of remarkable novels meant that his writing class became a sought-after institution. His fellow Floridian surrealist, Carl Hiaasen, for instance, told me that he failed to be accepted onto the course as an undergraduate.
By the mid-seventies Crews had also found a way of subsidising his trips away from the land of academe: magazine work. This, the most underrated aspect of his writing, began when Playboy called to ask him to write a piece on the building of the Alaskan pipeline. The result was a prizewinning slab of prime New Journalism, entitled ‘Going Down In Valdeez’, and it established Crews as a kind of white-trash Hunter S. Thompson. The 1979 collection of Crews’ magazine journalism, Blood And Grits, rates as one of his finest achievements.
It’s a period he looks back on with affection: ‘I canooed the Suwanee River, I backpacked the Appalachian trail from Georgia to Maine. I did all that stuff because it was a marvellous antidote to the other part of my life that is pen and paper and sitting down. The men I’ve spent my teaching life with — I’ve never felt a callus in their hands. Their hands all feel like women’s. Rarely have I met a professor who has worked up an honest sweat’.
Throughout the seventies Crews did his level best to make sure no one took him for your typical English professor. So much so that Harry Crews stories — of drink, drugs and debauchery — became common currency in the incestuous world of American letters. But for each observer who saw him as a romantic figure, a redneck Dylan Thomas, there were others that just saw him as sad — just a literary version of Keith Moon — a tame wild man patronised by the establishment.
But it was not the academic life itself that led Crews into his self-destructive ways. ‘It was me who brought all that stuff to the university and to everything else I’ve done. I know that there are men and women who have had that kind of sustained trauma that was my childhood. Who’ve had that and been able to walk on past it and leave it alone. But there’s others of us that it marks in such a way that we’ll never be free of it.’
By the late seventies Crews decided there was only one thing to do, to tackle his demons head on. To this end he set out on the writing of A Childhood, hoping that the act of remembrance would bring some kind of catharsis: ‘I thought that if I recalled what happened to me in the most direct and concrete language that I could, and didn’t lie, I would purge myself of that experience. Well, it didn’t work. It was excruciatingly painful to recall and relive that stuff. And after I’d written it I just woke up one morning and realised I didn’t give a shit anymore’.
‘Whatever you could shoot, I shot — cocaine, heroin, speed. My final drug of choice was dilaudid. It has a better rush than heroin. It comes in a pill and you crush it in a spoon, just as you would with heroin, cook it with a match, warm it a little bit, then shoot it up, You’re good for four, five hours. But the wonderful thing with dilaudid is you know what you’ve got in your hand. With heroin you don’t know what it’s cut with.’
It was nine years before the next Crews novel was published. An essay collection and a couple of short stories appeared, to give the illusion of productivity, but the truth was that Harry Crews was a long way out there.
Then, in 1986, a book called The Calling came out, written by Crews’ best student, a writer called Sterling Watson. At the heart of The Calling is a novelist, Eldon Odom — transparently based on Crews — who is portrayed as a once great novelist, now a sad lecherous drunk and major league bullshitter. It’s a portrait and a book that Crews unsurprisingly resents: ‘All I did to Watson was try to teach him as much as he could learn. I bought his whisky, I got him his agent. I even wrote a blurb for his first novel. Then he wrote that book: not only did he have me in there but my ex-wife, the girl I was living with at the time, my child. In the New York Times the reviewer said “This is supposed to be a roman à clef but you don’t need a key for this book; anyone who knows anything about literature knows this is Harry Crews”. Watson called me after it came out. I don’t know what he expected me to say. I told him it was a blood offence he’d committed, one that only blood can satisfy’.
But it may be that the shock of being portrayed not simply as grotesque, but as a fraud, acted as a spur for Crews. The publication of The Calling coincided with Crews’ return to the literary fray. It began with a novel called All We Need of Hell featuring a character called Duffy Deeter, who has served as Crews’ fictional alter ego several times over the years. Ostensibly a black comedy, the novel is at heart an unsparing portrait of Deeter as a compellingly awful archetype of the bad father: violent, overbearing, never satisfied. The father was transparently Crews himself — the writing group bully, the handball hard man.
Its publication saw the literary world finally rallying round to salute Crews’ maverick talent. When novelist Barry Hannah wrote that ‘We’re lucky to have this book’, many people knew that he wasn’t just paying a compliment, but speaking the literal truth.
Ever since, Crews has enjoyed a real renaissance. His early work was reissued. The likes of Nick Cave, Lydia Lunch and Henry Rollins began to namedrop him in interviews; Lunch and Rollins even going so far as to name their short-lived band after him. Whether Crews’ decision to acknowledge this new breed of fan by sporting a mohican and muscle T-shirt in his publicity photos was an entirely sound idea is of course another matter.
Whatever, his next novel The Knockout Artist, a skewed boxing novel set in New Orleans saw him back in top form, and when Sean Penn bought the movie rights, Crews found himself a Hollywood soulmate. Penn’s then wife Madonna even got in the act when she asked Crews to interview her.
The next novel, Body, was better yet, refining Crews’ peculiar ability to meld black comedy into authentic tragedy. A study of a female bodybuilder and her single-minded attempt to become Ms Cosmos, it is clearly inspired by Crews’ long relationship with Maggie Powell, a woman who Crews himself trained.
Body is, in a sense, the ultimate Crews novel. Certainly it has the ultimate Crews title. Few writers are so relentlessly concerned with the physical rather than the intellectual: ‘Yes,’ says Crews, ‘It’s because in athletics I can find the truth. You say you can lift 440 pounds on the bench — well I just happen to have 440 pounds and I got a bench… no more talk, we’ll see what you got. I do think that it’s through discipline of the body, and forcing the body beyond itself, that man comes to realisation of all those abstract nouns you read about — mercy and compassion and forgiveness and love and the rest of it’.
Around the time Body came out, Crews finally gave up drinking, driven by the realisation that if he carried on it was going to kill him sooner rather than later: ‘I was willing to do whatever I had to do I tried going to AA meetings, they all tell these sad stories — the time they took a shit in somebody’s ice box — well, we’ve all got a million of these stories and ultimately I found it just tremendously depressing. I’d leave wanting a drink. In the end I found a guy who had a great track record working with addicts and worked one on one, part talk, part hypnosis. I didn’t think it was do-able with alcohol, but I did. I quit’.
‘It’s not easy, though. You go out with a woman and she says, “What wine shall we have?” It’s awkward. Same with the book tour I just went on. Everywhere I went everyone was sloshed and a lot of people are going, “We gotta get Crews drunk and watch him show his ass or mutilate himself”. Well, they were disappointed. I won’t lie and say I enjoy being straight all the time. It’s a fucking drag as far as I’m concerned. If someone told me I had incurable cancer I’d be drunk tonight. To-night!’
Such restraint is clearly so alien to Crews’ nature that it might serve to explain why his novels since Body: Scar Lover and, now, The Mulching Of America, are rather lacking in, well, body. There are moments of vintage Crews strangeness here, but there’s also a lack of drive, of a sense that these books were clamouring to be written.
The same self-doubt, alternating with bluster, is apparent in Crews himself. We’ll be talking about what he’s going to write about next and he’ll mention a nearly completed novel, then mumble, ‘But my editor probably won’t like it’. Or we’ll drift on to Bosnia and he’ll gloomily offer that he thinks the conflict is insoluble, before suddenly brightening and adding, ‘Except by blood!’ Perhaps the saddest point of our talk comes when we discuss his writing class. Crews has expounded the need for tough teachers, for ruthless taskmasters like Belt in Karate is A Thing of the Spirit or Duffy Deeter in All We Need of Hell, or himself in real life. But when I ask which writers his course has produced, there’s a significant pause, and the only name he can come up with is that of Sterling Watson, the pupil who fought back.
One name that Crews doesn’t come up with is that of the Florida cop-turned-serial killer G.J. Schaefer, notorious for his so-called ‘killer fiction’ — stories of rape and murder that Schaefer claims are fiction but the police believe to be literal records of his crimes. I’d heard it rumoured that he had been one of Crews’ students; Crews confirmed it: ‘Yes, he was a former student of mine. I even played handball with the guy. He seemed like a good clean kid. But apparently that’s the way a lot of those guys are. He killed all those girls, I think they nailed him for two murders, because they could really make those cases, but they think he may have done as many as twenty-two’.
‘Playboy asked me to write about him. I finally got in to see him. He seemed to be in what they call denial. They found a lot of written stuff of his (Killer Fiction) and he wanted me to testify that I’d taught him to write like that. I said, “Man, I can’t do that. If you’d written any shit like that and turned it into me you’d have been out of the class”. Then he started talking about more stuff. And the more he talked I thought, “I don’t want to write about this guy, or what he did”.’
It’s a very Harry Crews decision, that one. What he couldn’t stomach in Schaefer was not that he was a murderer, but that he was a liar. For if Crews, in person, is prone to both bravado and self-pity, his claim on us as a writer, and as a person, is that he is in the end honest. His is a screwed-up talent, but his saving grace is that he knows it. And perhaps his clearest articulation of this comes in a remarkable essay he wrote inspired by the mass murderer Charles Whitman, who climbed a tower in Austin Texas and started sniping at random, finally killing fifteen people. It’s a piece that ends like this:
What I know is that all over the surface of the earth where humankind exists men and women are resisting climbing the tower. All of us have our towers to climb. Some are worse than others, but to deny that you have your tower to climb and that you must resist it or succumb to the temptation to do it, to deny that is done at the peril of your heart and mind.
All the way home to Gainesville, I felt that same tenuous diaphanous quality in the way I walked and what I did and what I said. Someone at that moment was climbing his tower, and I could only hope that he would not look down on me. But worse, much worse, I hoped that I would be spared being on the tower myself, because if I believe anything, I believe that the tower is waiting out there. I have no answers as to why it is out there, or even speculations about it, but out there somewhere, around some corner, or in some green meadow, or in some busy street it is. Waiting. (Climbing The Tower).
By the time we finish talking the room is in darkness. The last sound I hear on my tape when I play it back is the sound of Harry Crews apologising. I’m not sure what for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John L. Williams is a biographer, novelist, and crime writer from Cardiff. His non-fiction career began an age ago with his American crime-writing odyssey Into The Badlands. His latest book CLR James: A life Beyond The Boundaries is a biography of the great Trinidadian historian and revolutionary, and was a Times book of the year. He’s also the co-organiser of the Laugharne Weekend Festival in west Wales.
Fiction submissions to 3:AM are now open. We’re looking for stories on any subject, in any genre, at any length from flash fiction up to about 5,000 words. The only requirement is inventiveness of style or structure — or, preferably, both. No prescriptions on what this might look like in practice — a short, sharp sentence of Lutzian terseness is as welcome as a Bernhardian rant — except to say that it has to have a voice or a timeflow that distinguishes it from the sort of stuff that usually wins accolades.
Here are some great stories to show you how it can be done: Helen McClory, ‘Take Care, I Love You’; Camilla Grudova, ‘Notes From a Spider’; Cathy Sweeney, ‘The Woman With Too Many Mouths’; Linda Mannheim, ‘The Young Woman Sleeps While the Artist Paints Her’; Jo Lloyd, ‘My Bonny’; Rob Doyle, ‘John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’; Joseph Scapellato, ‘Snake Canyon’; David Hayden, ‘Leckerdam of the Golden Hand’; Kevin Barry, ‘See the Tree, How Big It’s Grown’; Gabriel Blackwell, ‘( )’.
The list goes on, of course, but ultimately your preferred mode of adventurousness is entirely up to you.
To submit your work, please send no more than 5,000 words to the Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood, at [email protected]. Longer submissions may be accepted, but please don’t submit more than 5,000 words in the first instance and please do indicate the total word count in the body of your email. Be sure to include your name and a short bio with your submission. All submissions will receive a response by March 15.
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